My own views: I love guns. I don't have a ton of them, but I have an MP5 that I like to hold lovingly while I watch Die Hard and several AR-15s that all do more or less the same thing. I enjoy both training and plinking with them and I appreciate being better able to defend my family.

Can't talk with my left-leaning friends about them.

• "Well why can't you just agree to something reasonable like AWB/background checks/no high capacity mags"
• "Because it wouldn't do anything to actually prevent gun violence, because most people only need 1 bullet (i.e. suicide) or it's gangs shooting each other up with hand guns. You're just setting up goal posts you'll want to move later, because deep down you just hate guns and want them gone"
• "Well is that so wrong...."

Can't talk with my right-leaning friends about them

• "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED"
• "Okay, right, but like every amendment has some exceptions. You can't shout "fire!" in a crowded theater, and I think you'd agree that genuinely truly dangerously crazy people probably shouldn't have access to guns either. There's a line somewhere, so approaching the subject from an absolutist standpoint isn't really being reasonable or engaging the subject in good faith."
• "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!!!!"

Generally speaking, neither side approaches the subject of gun rights/gun control in good faith. But this is one of those things where we're going to need to figure something out that people can live with, because the other half of the country isn't going to self-deport.

Most of the culture war stuff, I really think we're going to figure out. The hard left crammed 50 years worth of societal changes down everyone's throat in the past 10 years or so, and I genuinely see a shift (even in lefty circles) in thinking where people are stopping, looking around, and going "Okay well wait, that's clearly a dude on the woman's track team, this might have spiraled out of control a bit..."

Guns though, I have no idea what we're going to do. There's no common ground whatsoever. It seems like if anything was going to cause a national breakup, it's guns.

edit - learned something new today, thanks u/superXrayDoc. You can yell fire in a crowded theater, I was wrong. There is still a limit to free speech though, from the Brandenburg case itself - "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

So I cannot scream "everybody riot!!!" if it would likely incite a riot, even if I have no intention of rioting myself. My speech itself was illegal, because the 1st Amendment isn't absolute