Yes, but my point (perhaps not spelled out here the way it should be) is that you have to change the societal attitudes first, and then let the laws follow along afterwards.

The model I like to point to is Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Their early efforts to change the laws on drunk driving were largely failures. But they managed to change the terms of the debate. Before MADD, drunk drivers were treated as an appropriate source of humor—I can remember movies and cartoons depicting some drunk being poured into his car and weaving his way down the road, and you were supposed to think it was funny. When you see those scenes now, you don't laugh.

But I see very little of that from the anti-gun crowd. They seem to think that you can change the laws first—and that's never going to work. They push an incrementalist approach that tries to nibble away at gun rights around the edges, which is slightly less futile, but no more effective. (The "assault weapons" ban never banned anything but cosmetic details of gun design, and then expired.) They also argue about whether this or that weapon has any legitimate purpose, which is also never going to work, if their goal is (as it needs to be) to change the terms of the debate.

What might work is to deal substantively with the notion that a very large fraction of the US population thinks that being an armed people is a good idea, and that each one of us has a constitutional right to be armed, so as to be a member of the armed populous. But the anti-gun folks seem to find that notion so incomprehensible that they just can't deal with it seriously.

(Ditto, of course, with cars, pedestrians and bicycles. I've been very glad to see the ads that oppose "distracted driving" by quoting the banal text messages that people were reading just before they killed someone. That needs to come first, before we're going to get laws against using cell phones while driving.)