Most of this ends up a gross oversimplification using assumption, sweeping strokes of the pen, and trite tautological truisms. Whatever you'd like to call what this will be, it's not necessarily deep but it just might be insightful a bit at times. We'll largely go with extremes and with absolutes, in a vague sort of generalized way. Try and keep it low on the buzz words and catch phrases and personal anecdotal examples that don't really mean much. That is, follow along with the point, and we might just make it through.
There are two groups, which the names of just might say it all. We have anti-gun. We have pro-gun.
For guns and against guns. Really. How spectacularly uninformative pro-gun and anti-gun are on the surface. For hammers, against swords, no comment on dynamite or chainsaws or ice cream. Our pro and anti terms have nothing much showing up top but what the reader makes out of them.
Deep within, yes, much is there. Roll the imagery around in your head. Consider the explanatory power of the two terms, think of the meaning of what the words actually mean, and the mental pictures and feelings the terms bring up for you. What do pro-gun and anti-gun make you think of? What do you think they make other people think of? Have you considered the other viewpoint, or do you deny there is one. Do you ignore that other people just don't agree with you. Are you unaware that some might decide to use force to make their point.
If you aren't fully shoved and squished against one side or the other already, what do you get out of considering both of those -gun terms. Consider them with at least some measure of free-will, at least somewhat out of a total immersion within perception and preconception and bias. What's there for you in pro-gun and anti-gun, is it those who 'are for the wholesale slaughter of innocents' versus those who 'wish to be at the whim and mercy of the elite and powerful'? Or is it something else, in the middle or towards the ends? Or can you only see one or the other, and naught else but that side?
One way to put it is that the anti- side believes and feels and knows that all weapons, especially and even more so guns, are evil. They have no use but to kill. They are for war, for aggression, for all that is bad and base and animalistic about humans. Guns have no real function, they are an abomination that if only they were gone, things would be peaceful, nice, calm and thus open for humanity to reach its full potential. Nobody needs guns, and nobody should have guns. Guns in and of themselves are bad, 100%, make no mistake. Knives and bows and baseball bats and rebar in the hands of a single person can't slaughter dozens of innocents in minutes; but a girl with a .22 pistol and a backpack of loaded magazines can do so.
One way to put it is that the pro- side believes and feels and knows that all weapons, including but not limited to guns, are simply inert inanimate objects. Tools to be used. Their primary use is whatever the owner needs it for, but largely the items put power and control in the hands of the individual. They are for collecting, for enjoying the firing of, for defense, for survival food and otherwise. One of their uses is against those who would misuse them. Guns have a history going back some thousand years and are a part of humanity that could no more be erased than could moveable type, toothpaste, soap, clocks, paper money or spectacles. Guns are not inherently good or bad. People were killing each other for thousands of years before gunpowder was invented by the Chinese around 700 to 850. After that, it was only that who was holding which end of the stick; it depended not upon guns themselves, but on who had more and better of them, what sort of people they were, and under what circumstances.
How easily then might the debate be expressed? Simply perhaps. We might say, the sides hate each other. They each think the other is as nuanced and understanding as a backwards-facing timing-retarded chimpanzee-giraffe DNA-splice wearing a blindfold and earplugs is at building a fusion reactor from pie plates and some rocks that might have some uranium isotopes in them. Others might say "Of course, that is how things are." After all, these groups have opposite viewpoints stemming from vastly different places of understanding, conception and perception. Both are both filled with emotion and extremely unlikely to ever listen to each other, much less agree. That is somewhat how "the debate" is in many ways phrased, stated and understood, albeit not exactly or directly obviously. In the end, just as with a lot of things, in various ways all of the ways to describe "the other side" might even be somewhat true. That there are sides in a matter of opinion, what of that.
Which all seems a rabbit hole of no return to discuss. How about just making it one question to answer then: Who is correct, the anti-gun or the pro-gun? Perhaps to some extent, they both are. Both of them, even beyond one simplest part of all. That within their group, alone, on its own, they are fully correct.
Once you bring it out in public, trying to make the two mesh, that's where the troubles are, that's where the complexity lives and breathes.
