I'm liberal on most issues. I don't see why a liberal cannot support the liberty to own effective firearms. Why should we only get the ineffective crap that wouldn't actually make the corrupt and powerful feel sufficiently inhibited to start a prolonged period of martial law or some other militaristic precursor to tyranny? Unarmed populations don't resist that sort of thing as well as armed ones and even just having the guns in the population affects the calculations of would be tyrants. Bullets are cheap, but dead personnel, and destroyed supplies are not as cheap. It's not as binary as so many of us would like to simulate. The government requires our economic (food, resources and labor, not just money) support. As the civil unrest would drag on, the edifice of oppression used against the population would start to falter. It's not a blitzkrieg type scenario that the government would crush all opposition in weeks or months or that the rebels would overtake the government in weeks or months.

Hopefully this would never happen, but as the military (private) industrial complex hides stuff from even the president and as the intelligence and military (private) contractors can be infiltrated or employed by the wealthy on wall street that have tried similar crap before, I don't think we are completely safe from such a scenario either. If you don't think that the wall street wealthy would try to overthrow the government, look up the name Smedley Butler. They planned to within the last 100 years. Luckily it didn't happen, partially thanks to this man. These kinds of wealthy businessmen looking for more power, control and wealth are almost always the ones to do this kind of thing. One day we'll collectively acknowledge that. They have the means, motive and opportunity, while most of lack all of them.

Shooters would get good firearms too, but they can already now. I feel safe enough with the current situation. I don't even own a gun and I don't really want one. I'll most likely die of heart disease or cancer and so will you. I am more worried about how these shooters turn out so often to be on antidepressants. Chalking their behavior up to depression I think may be missing something. Users of antidepressants sometimes report an increase in violent thoughts and emotional numbness (some even report a numbness of sexual feelings and sensation), a clear recipe for a depressed person to become a shooter. We should expect that research into such a thing would be effectively blocked by an industry worth many $billions.

I think liberals are so often against gun rights or rather are pro gun control, because much of the support for the Democrats comes from urban areas, with police and sometimes gang violence. They don't want gangs and criminals to have guns and they know law enforcement is a call away. Furthermore, firing a gun in a residential neighborhood is a big no no. Conservatives are so often for gun rights, because they live more in rural areas, where gangs are not a problem, but the police are not so quick to respond, and wild animals actually become threatening. They don't suffer gun violence like the city goers do and they see more utility from owning guns. They have more of a sense of independence from the system, and a gun is a sense of security, a great equalizer for them. I totally sympathize with that point of view and the liberal one from the cities, but the liberals fail to observe the dark realities of life sometimes, I hate to say. Criminals and gangs just import guns in areas that ban them while law abiding citizens end up not having them, so criminals and gangs feel even more secure to assault people with guns, because they don't feel as afraid of being shot themselves.

Nobody wants to think that our government will turn against its own people (from the ambitions of a relative few actors using key positions) so they pretend it cannot happen in our modern world anymore. They are just willfully ignorant in my opinion. It's also ignorant to lean on guns as if they would prevent tyranny, they are a last resort like a life vest on a sinking ship. They don't keep the ship from hitting the ice berg and they don't guarantee survival afterward either.