An enraged spate of hate always shows up when gun control is even mentioned. Why?

This has confounded me for some time.

I find it particularly vexing because if one takes a step back and looks at firearms regulation in a broad context, there is broad agreement between most people on most aspects of the subject.

---There is broad agreement criminals should not be allowed to have firearms.

---There is broad agreement the mentally unstable should not be allowed to have firearms.

---There is broad agreement that, at some point, the potential damage a weapon can cause significantly outweighs any legitimate benefit it would have for private individual use. Hence, most people agree Joe or Jane Average Citizen should not be able to buy RPGs, land mines, anthrax warheads, or an M1 Abrams tank at their local Wal-Mart (the dispute over "assault rifles" occurs at the borderline of this broad agreement).

Yet, when some people of normally reasonable character discuss incremental changes at the boundaries of this broad agreement, it is treated as a life-or-death freedom-or-totalitarianism existential crisis.

The best explanation I can offer is guns have become a proxy for the ongoing cultural battles within our populace. Those battles break down along multiple axes (although there is often considerable overlap). Rural vs. urban, explicitly Christian vs. secular, white domination vs. multiculturalism, traditional authoritarian social structures vs. egalitarian democratic structures, etc. are all part of the mix.

In that context, labeling someone a "gun-grabber"  or a "gun nut" is a shorthand way to classify that person as being on the other side of the broader cultural battles of which the exact form of firearms regulations are a small part.

This is done because it works. The NRA used to be a politically insignificant organization more focused on teaching people to use guns safely than on lobbying to get its way in centers of political power.  Today, it is extremely influential and largely gets its way regardless of what the larger populace wants (e.g. Polls indicate universal background checks on gun sales/transfers are very popular, even among Republicans, but the NRA does not want them, so Congress never considers them).

The video below is one of my all-time favorite examples of this. The Club for Growth doesn't go into the relative merits or disadvantages of the tax proposal. They simply invoke stereotypes about People Not Like Us.