Your take feels very cynical, along the lines of "religion is opium for the masses". In this view, people are dupes stringed along by Machiavellist figures, who cannot possibly have strong feelings about various topics themselves.
Gun laws may not be very relevant in India, but neither are caste-related topics in the USA. This is normally called a different culture.
But the right-wing playbook is the same everywhere, frame these issues in a way to maximize fear and link that fear to nostalgia of a better past. In the US guns are big. In Russia there’s an appeal to the bygone Soviet era where all Russian speakers were under one flag.
In the US, the gun argument is the most transparent. Gun marketers evoke (mostly bullshit) memories of how great great grandpa fed the family shooting turkeys with his flintlock, then fought some redcoats for freedom. Then they hard pivot to why you need a concealed carry pistol to stop wild Mexicans from raping your daughter. It’s a really effective argument because it links the gun, crime, immigration, abortion, etc. Then after you spend this money, the liberals are gonna take your guns, so buy more.
The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues. Progressive voters care about everything, but the get out the vote machines are more moderate.
Despite your own personal viewpoints guns are very popular in the United States among both parties.
From a perspective of a country where gun controls are far stronger, this idea that democrats are "antigun" seems hilariously partisan. Democrats only seem to be proposing modest gun controls compared to Republicans.
What do you define as "most of their funding"? What percentage of Democrat funding comes from Soros or Bloomberg?
I had a weird upbringing. One side of my family was big in county republican politics, the other were unionists and involved in democratic politics. Nobody talked about any of this crap growing up.
What did change is crazy people become prominent starting around Obama times. People I’ve known for years are now difficult to talk to as they have been pulled into a world of paranoia and crazy.
That’s not true. About half of Black people oppose same sex marriage, about the same as republicans. But they go along with white liberals on social issues in exchange for getting their support on civil rights issues. But, for example, they voted in favor of California’s 2008 ban on same sex marriage. (Back then, they overwhelmingly opposed same sex marriage.) There’s a fair argument that what pushed the referendum over the top was very high Black turnout because Obama was on the ballot.
Similarly, Muslims mostly vote Democrat and support same sex marriage… for other people: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres...
Non-whites vote democrat for different reasons than whites. For them, issues like civil rights, immigration rights, religious freedom for minorities, etc., are often dispositive of other issues. And insofar as many are immigrants, they don't feel ownership over the broader culture. My parents vote Democrat and view these social and cultural issues as being between white Americans. That works both ways--if Democrats supported outlawing abortion they might have some "population control"-type objections, but really wouldn't care because they'd never accept abortion in their own circle anyway.
When you look at the older voting population, numbers skew different.