They neither trust the government nor believe that it will protect them

This is not as slam dunk evidence as the author seems to believe it to be but it is one more data point suggesting that naive gun control is ineffective. Other large studies have counter findings, a fact which leads me to suspect that the details of a gun control measure matter more than people realize as well as, possibly, the narrow socioeconomic cultural attributes of the targeted populations.

From California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths, Johns Hopkins Study Finds by Jon Miltimore.

In 1991, California simultaneously imposed comprehensive background checks for firearm sales and prohibited gun sales (and gun possession) to people convicted of misdemeanor violent crimes. The legislation mandated that all gun sales, including private transactions, would have to go through a California-licensed Federal Firearms License (FFL) dealer. Shotguns and rifles, like handguns, became subject to a 15-day waiting period to make certain all gun purchasers had undergone a thorough background check.

It was the most expansive state gun control legislation in America, affecting an estimated one million gun buyers in the first year alone. Though costly and cumbersome, politicians and law enforcement agreed the law was worth it.

The legislation would “keep more guns out of the hands of the people who shouldn’t have them,” said then-Republican Gov. George Deukmejian.

“I think the new laws are going to help counter the violence,” said LAPD spokesman William D. Booth.

More than a quarter of a century later, researchers at Johns Hopkins and UC Davis dug into the results of the sweeping legislation. Researchers compared yearly gun suicide and homicide rates over the 10 years following implementation of California’s law with 32 control states that did not have such laws.

They found “no change in the rates of either cause of death from firearms through 2000.”

The findings, which run counter to experiences in Missouri and Connecticut that did show a link between background checks and gun deaths, appear to have startled the researchers.

There are some other interesting pieces floating around the past week. From What Both Sides Don't Get About American Gun Culture by Austin Sarat and Jonathan Obert. I am not sure about the "both sides" guff. Seems from the article it is primarily on one side where the misunderstandings arise - the side which has a strict and inflexible Manichaean worldview which entertains the notion that gun ownership puts you on the wrong side of a moral veil and therefore beyond redemption. In the real, rational, world, people understand the complexity of goals and objectives and tentatively work to nudge a little here, pull a little there to protect the freedom of self-protection, sustain cultural norms, appreciate and cultivate multiculturalism (in the sense of recognizing that rich urban bubbles are culturally distinct from everyone else), etc.

The view of guns as neutral tools, a view shared by conservative defenders of gun rights as well as liberal advocates of gun regulation, misses a crucial fact about guns and gun ownership. It wrongly assumes that the distribution of guns and their presence in their owners' lives are totally independent facts that don't shape the opportunities and choices of the people who use them.

But increasingly, research into the culture and political views of gun owners is painting a very different portrait. Gun owners' politics don't generally fall into lockstep with the NRA—but guns themselves are woven into people's lives in ways that go far beyond a tool. This suggests that the path to gun law reform won’t be as simple as liberals might hope or conservatives might fear.

One of the most authoritative and interesting surveys of the attitudes of gun owners was conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017. That survey shows the vast majority of Americans who own guns are not members of the NRA and that most favor some form of gun control. However, most refrain from pushing for greater regulation of guns because they neither trust the government nor believe that it will protect them. They often resent the disdain for their way of life of the kind expressed by President Barack Obama when he suggested they “cling to guns or religion” as a way of expressing “antipathy to people who aren't like them … as a way to explain their frustrations." They see themselves as on their own in a dangerous world.

"They neither trust the government nor believe that it will protect them" is the rub of it. If those who wish to overturn a long-standing check on government overreach are all lackeys of the state (bureaucrats, academia and the mainstream media), then it raises suspicions. Given the Mandarin Class disdain for and disinterest in the living conditions of 80% of the population, those suspicions become locked in. Given the parade of corruption and incompetence in the geographies of those politicians calling for the overturn of the Second Amendment, those suspicions are fully justified. Given that almost none of the recommended forms of gun control are ever pertinent to, or would have prevented, any of the rare mass killings, the suspicion verges on a well-sustained fact.

It is as if Sarat and Obert are bemoaning that the very transparency of gun fanatics is what is making it hard to convince people to trust them. Well, yes.