Why an anti-gun platform will always backfire for the Democrats.

Thought I had today, sharing for discussion:

Anti-gun policies rely, like all policy proposals, on political messaging, and the Democrats' chosen message is, as far as I can tell: "People who own guns are kind of weird and/or naive, and people who really like guns are creepy and/or dangerous."

This is never going to work because the party relies on a combo of 1) uber-macro polling on vaguely described gun legislation (or rather, memes masquerading as legislation) and 2) subjective impressions of normative policy positions based on the local "feel" re: guns that a small selection of US metro areas with outsized cultural capital share/exhibit.

The fact is that this messaging is cringe to virtually all of the 32% of Americans who own a gun and probably the large majority of the 44% of Americans who live in a household in which at least one member owns a gun. You can't consistently win with this approach unless the opposition is always comic book-villain evil.

The question I have is how deeply held this position actually is. I have a hard time believing someone like Seth Moulton or even Tim Walz actually believes the kind of Kerry-esque "I carried this rifle in war, and no civilian should blah blah blah."

It feels instead to me like it's a bit of a "fallacy of division," i.e. that because the Dems have been elected on an entire platform that means to the party grandees that the individual planks in that platform, such as the anti-gun ones, are awesome and beloved.

What does everyone else think?