Where did anti-gun-control voters tend to live in the 1980s and 1990s?

[darklordoftech]

You always hear on Atlas about how the GOP was “suburban” in the 1980s and 1990s, but the NRA was around then, each party had the same view guns as today, and the Assault Weapons Ban played a big role in the Republican Revolution of 1994.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

There were a lot of suburban Republicans that supported gun control as part of the larger tough on crime package.

What crippled the Democrats was that a number of rural Democrats voted for gun control in a Democratic administration and gave opponents a wedge to leverage support on. At the same time a number of Republican incumbents and candidates won in pro-gun control areas, only for the party's position on guns to erode their positions in these districts. A number of suburban seats flipped in the late 1990s, including for instance NY-04 in 1996, where gun control featured heavily as an issue.