> I don't really think Americans are willing to give up their extremely consumerist lives to fight and potentially die over what is essentially a hobby to most.

> I don't really think Americans are willing to give up their extremely consumerist lives to fight and potentially die over what is essentially a hobby to most. I strongly disagree with the characterization that firearms are a "hobby to most". That might have been the case as recently as the 1980s, but the push for gun control in the 1990s, culminating in the "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994, galvanized gun owners. I believe that a comfortable majority of gun owners today see through a political lens, not as a hobby. There's a reason the AR-15 became so prominent so quickly: they were (ineffectively) banned in 1994. When the Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004, they flew off the shelves. They became symbols of the resistance to gun control, to the point that they acquired the nickname "America's Rifle". Now consider that in 1994, there were far, far fewer ARs in citizens' hands and a gun culture that was largely oriented around hunting. In 2023, American gun culture is firmly rooted in political activism.