Edit: That's my point proven
Making your cause a parochial concern of a single political party is almost always going to be good for that party and bad for your cause.
While your trend is correct, I think you're mixing up cause and effect as evidenced by your later statement:
> in a lot of circles I'm not comfortable discussing even absolute basic things like "you might want a gun for home protection if you live in a high crime area"
That more closely describes those circles' perceptions and positions than anything else. A positive rating from the NRA for a Democrat seems like a bigger risk for the Democrat than the NRA and probably correlates with them being primary'd.
Is it also republican's fault that there seem to be no democrats opposed to putting transgender women into women's sports?
Is it also republican's fault that repeating the n-word in the context of trying to have a discussion with a student about its meaning will get you fired?
Or maybe the better explanation for all this is that democrats have moved substantially to the left?
For a more concrete example, concealed carry has been a large and unambiguous gun rights success story, with shall-issue going from pretty rare in the 80s to near-universal today. What I'd expect an effective gun rights organization to produce is a roadmap for how to convince the holdouts. Illinois passed their shall-issue law with 76% in favor, and Washington has had it for decades; what lessons does this teach us about how to get left-leaning people on board? If a group of California residents wants to convince their sheriff to issue more permits or their assemblyperson to support statewide shall-issue, what should they say? I'd really like to see answers to these questions (please do send me links if you have any!), but as far as I can tell the NRA is wholly uninterested in thinking about them.
> in a lot of circles I'm not comfortable discussing even absolute basic things like "you might want a gun for home protection if you live in a high crime area"
Why not? What will be the consequences for you to state such an "absolute basic thing"?
It would suffice to say though that if you assume a democrat politician supports gun control either by personal conviction or the nature of caucusing, you would be right 95+% of the time. It is as much of a shame that a democrat majority is de facto hostile to gun rights as it is that the NRA hitched its wagon to unrelated culture issues.
A major reason why that shift happened was because if there was a pro-gun Democrat and a pro-gun Republican facing off against each other in a tight race, the NRA would back the pro-gun Republican and claim that the Democrat was going to take your guns away. The net result is that it is always a losing position for a Democrat to be pro-gun.
So over the past 20 years the pro-gun Democrats have almost entirely died off. The NRA is probably the single most significant driver of this shift.
As to why there aren’t outspoken pro-gun democrats, I hardly think you can blame the NRA for that. The NRA just doesn’t matter all that much, bogey man reputation aside. Realistically, how much of a chance does a Dem candidate have in a primary, all else being equal, if they are an outspoken advocate of gun rights? It impacts their funding, their volunteer support. The reality is that the DNC’s official platform is anti-gun, and a politician who doesn’t support a party’s platform (on either side of the aisle) is increasingly rare these days. It has more to do with the lack of opportunity for nuanced political positions.
Why not? because you might be shamed?
Not singling you out. Trying to do a Root Cause Analysis.
I think society's aversion to being shamed has actually caused the act of shaming to be even more overreactive, which is a positive feedback loop.