Issues which are made into major political issues dont have to be either rational or the result of specific policy grievances. Guns are turning into a white identity issue in response to the changing demographics of this country and the seemingly increasing attention given to it as an issue has more to do with the crazies taking over the GOP in response to said demographic change.
A lot of people on Atlas assume that the issue of guns is due to some rational policy objective about which type of guns should be legal or the legal capacity limit for rounds, etc.... but it never has anything to do with that. Issues can be purely tribal and symbolic with no shred of logical purpose.
The time period in which political issues become major political issues is irrelevant. Whether or not guns mattered more in 2000 or 1996 or 1992 doesn't really have to have an straightforward causal explanation. It's pure happenstance that it started mattering more in 2000 than in past elections -or- it was the result of generational turnover within the party structure.
Think of guns turning into a major political issue as a result of a slow moving process driven by a right wing political elite that know future demographics and changing political coalitions that are coming. Guns were lumped into their political coalition along with other issues as the result of pure historical circumstances for random groups of right-wing political activists (as opposed to logical policy grievances). Now ordinary voters don't know complex things like this but they take their cue from party leaders and adopt major issues accordingly which they assume must matter for some reason since someone higher up on the hierarchy have made it so. Because there has been a slow decent into crazy town within the GOP starting with Reagan and the political fruits of that have come into fruition at random times based on the political make up of SCOTUS or the Congress; its tempting to seek causal explanations for why a certain issue became a major issue but alot of times there is none.
Guns being correlated with white resentment has more to do with the GOP slowly emptying out over time as the party of resentful white Christian males from rural areas and due to that....certain issues "float to the top" in matter of importance.
