I think it is important to look behind the pro anti gun positions so dominate in gun debate threads, where one side tries to prove this or that based on some study done by so and so or so and step back and ask ourselves what the gun psychosis is really all about. The answer, of course is money.
All the gun psychosis and all the reaction from fearful liberals stimulated by it is all there to milk the poor conservative brain defective out of their hard earned cash. Obama is the greatest gun salesman that ever lived. The more the gun industry can tweak and stimulate their psychotic fears of loss of gun ownership, the more these poor suckers will buy weapons to hoard away. Their brain defects stimulated by right wing media knows full well how to pull their teats and milk them. And every time a liberal faints with fear of guns, somewhere a cash register is going ka ching. It can be expensive to have a brain defect. Having an oversized right amygdala can run up some bills and make some smart people rich.
Silly conservative are just like the battery people in the Matrix, being kept asleep and bled.
I'll be honest, MB, I'm not sure I understand your point, so perhaps I'm off on a tangent. That said, I think the basic flaw in your premise is that it presumes gun supporters are all conservatives and gun opponents are all liberals. Yet we've seen in the many threads here that this gun support does not divide along such ideological lines. I'd also say while fear certainly drives many people in both camps, it is not the only factor, and I question whether it's even the primary driver.
For many gun rights supporters (myself included), the issues are the recognition that guns are a tool with many legitimate uses (both defensive and recreational), and that ownership is a right enshrined in our Constitution. We also recognize that the most visible anti-gun advocacy is empty theater. For example, fixating on cosmetic features (e.g., "assault" weapons) is pandering to ignorance, especially given that such weapons represent a miniscule fraction of all gun violence. Pragmatically, we also recognize that the genie is out of the bottle. It may well be America would be a better place if we had no guns ... but it would also be swell if we could all grow pots of gold in our unicorn gardens. It just isn't going to happen. Ever.
Conversely, gun opponents aren't necessarily fearful of guns. Instead, they objectively recognize that guns are the most efficient way of killing people, and they are used to kill thousands of Americans each year. It makes sense for anyone who values human life to want to eliminate a major factor in deaths. That's logic, not fear. Though I don't think their methods are effective, I do understand the concern and the feeling that doing something, even if it only saves a handful of lives, is better than doing nothing at all.