But they do not treat them as agents of the devil, as liberals often do. But then Republicans are political amateurs. They leave a business in the business sector to go fight city hall over practical matters. They want to restrain the leviathan that is suffocating enterprise. Or, less nobly, they want to harness it to some self-interested goal.
Liberals have a grander design.
Their interest in politics is missionary. They see government as a means to social redemption, to change the world. They're not there to tinker with gun-control laws. In the nightmares of NRA supporters, this means to do whatever it takes and to trample over any rights necessary, to remove all 240 million guns from public possession in the quest for a utopia where violence no longer exists. The reason liberals are so bigoted lies a vision which has ancestral roots in the Puritan origins of the American new world.