I don't even think it's a might-makes-right issue yet. They have guns, sure. But that's still basically nothing in the face of government force.

My point was more along the lines of that in all of these gun control discussions, there are mistaken expectations from a lot of liberal people.

Liberals keep engaging in this conversation as if it were a negotiation between reasonable people trying to find common ground. That if the cost of a lack of regulation grows too high, that if they make the right arguments, that if they offer the right compromises, they can move towards moderate gun control.

But that's not what's happening. The gun lobby has repeatedly shown that any regulation, no matter how small, will be viewed the same way as a complete forcible disarming, and will be opposed with the same vigour. And that there is no cost of human life that will ever change that.

For the 2nd Amendment types, the conversation is already over. Everything they say is meaningless, because they don't actually care if what they say is true, they don't care if the regulation works or not. They are just saying things to shut down the discourse, and if you counter them, they'll just move on to the next point like nothing has changed. Because to them nothing has changed.