is mirrored by some extremists' view of 'our' position.
I know people who hold that extremist view of 'our' position, and some of 'us' who do, in fact, hold that position. What we have is less a blatant mischaracterization and more a question of seeing group homogeneity when there isn't any and choosing a non-representative sample as representing the group.
The NRA doesn't oppose all gun control, for example. But a few extremists who we confuse with the NRA do. We do the same thing they do. It's how all stereotypes are formed. Welcome to being human and to the glorious practice of othering.
You misunderstand automobiles, which is curious since we all probably are sure we know how they work. I owned one for years in my garage. I couldn't take it off my property. No need to register it and certainly no need to insure it. All that insurance and registration is permission to use the public roads, and there are usually alternatives to car insurance (same alternatives in Texas as in California, amusingly) so car insurance really isn't required--just convenient. Moreover, if I have a 40k acre ranch, I can have a dozen pickup trucks, all uninsured and unregistered for use on my land. And if I put them on trailers and don't use them on the roads, I can transport them anywhere I want. If I want to take it on the road, I get a temporary permit, certify that it wasn't operated on the public roads, and drive it for a month until it passes the emissions test. Then I get it inspected and registered, and it can go on the public roads. If you don't ever run into some of the details because you don't have a use for them, you probably don't know they exist or how they work. That's how it works with cars. You want more onerous restrictions than cars have but use cars as the model.
That's pretty much how guns work. You want to carry a gun in your trunk, unloaded, fine. No problem. You want to carry it concealed and loaded, you need a permit. Insurance is a good idea, too, but there are alternatives. I don't need a background check, though, to buy a car from a dealer; I can easily kill with it, though. Even on private property. If I buy a car for off-road use and don't register it, in some states it's a regulatory violation, but not all--and it's certainly in the interests of the seller to see that it's re-registered (and that's the law in some states--you sell the car, you have to submit the information that it was sold, the buyer doesn't.)
I personally think that weapon discharges shouldn't be treated as lesser crimes if reasonable precautions were not taken. If somebody is trained and take reasonable precautions, it's like a car crash--sometimes things get out of control, or your car is stolen and used, etc. But if you're texting or drunk or high because you've self-medicated, it's not negligent; it's intentional, you intentionally deprived yourself of the attention necessary to keep from killing somebody because you thought a text or a buzz was more important than somebody's existence. So if you let a kid play with a gun that's loaded and it's not instruction related and closely supervised, I consider it intentional. And non-lethal accidents in those states should be classified as attempted murder. There'd be hell to pay over my views of DUI or driving while texting. But if we value life, we value life. Mostly we value life when the price is going to be paid by other people. We always know that the risks we take are justified, whether texting or drinking while driving, driving too close or too fast, or how we use guns. But none of this would affect 1/2 of gun deaths, suicides. We understand our motivations, it's always the other guy's motivations and actions that are dubious. Can't really trust them people, they're not like us.
The problem with semi-automatic weapons is fear and fear-based anger, plus non-familiarity. We've had semi-automatic weapons for 125 years or so, but that relies on a technicality: We've had what amounts to semi-automatic pistols for decades longer, pull the trigger and the next round is automatically loaded using a ratchet mechanism. We call them "revolvers" (not true semi-automatic). But for many who are newbies to the idea, they seem new and recent. They predate cars by decades. Many activities assume self-reloading guns. I've seen bolt-action pistols, but really, they're cumbersome for anything but really precision shooting, and too slow for a lot of uses. The problem is the idiots behind the trigger and the culture that puts honor above another's life or get involved in illegal deals. Or live around such idiots. It's worth pointing out that a lot of non-homicidal uses for pistols a lot of progressives frown upon as inappropriate for civilized urban living, and therefore inappropriate all around.
Obama started in the middle for the ACA for his own reasons. Some were foolish and came off as arrogant and condescending. "I've looked over what I think you want and here's the reasonable compromise I decided you should want." However, in the actual event that was probably a convenient fiction to save his party's butt: He had trouble getting the compromise bill through, and the reason it took so long and has so many "GOP" landmines was getting the necessary number of (D) votes lined up in the Senate, and a safety margin in the House. Those compromises got no (R) votes in the Senate but did get (D) votes. Even the "GOP landmines" that were put forward early weren't usually real compromises for anybody but Obama and his aides: Most of them were ideas floated years before by one (R) or another in some policy paper, but which were either abandoned or never really got any love from other (R). In fact, most (R) looked at most of them and said, "Really, some Republican came up with that sorry excuse for an idea? How embarrassing" even as (D) sources were like, "This is really a common Republican idea and widely accepted, and they only reason they don't like it know is because Obama." You know how if you look in a fish bowl things don't always appear to be as they are? It's the same for the fish looking outside the bowl.
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