Here’s a reminder that modern gun control laws in the US got started during the civil rights movement by conservatives, because lawmakers were scared of black people owning guns.
The civil rights protestors realized that peaceful unarmed protests were quickly and violently busted… Cops had no qualms about dragging protestors around, beating people, firing into crowds, etc… But peaceful heavily armed protests had cops politely watching from across the street. Because firing into a crowd is a lot less appealing when the entire crowd can immediately return fire.
When conservative lawmakers saw heavily armed protestors on the front steps of their capitol buildings, and saw police completely unwilling to break the protests up, they got really fucking sweaty really fucking quickly. So Ronald Reagan (yes, the same Reagan who is treated as a paragon of conservative values by conservative talking-heads), and the NRA (yes, the same NRA who lobbies for looser gun control laws in the wakes of school shootings), co-authored and quickly passed the Mulford Act. At the time, it was the single most restrictive gun control law that had ever been passed, and it set the stage for modern gun control laws.