I want to point out an imbalance in your reasoning. Essentially, you are judging both sides by a different standard.

> how emotional and out of touch the anti-gun crowd gets > someone stands up and says “Oh hey here’s an idea why don’t we just ban all guns lol!!”

Here, you are essentially judging gun-opponents by their worst examples. That is, you are judging them by their members that are loud and unreasonable.

> Gun owners are all about safety and personal responsibility, and many do support sensible gun control laws.

Here, you are judging gun-owners and presumably those who are against all firearms being illegal by something better than their worst examples. When you say "Gun owners are all about safety and personal responsibility" you are essentially judging this group by their ideals, not their practice. Moreover, it seems unlikely that literally all gun owners actually hold these ideals. Those that don't are a fringe crowd, but you judged the 'anti-gun' people by that same fringe.

Now, I am not accusing you, this is rather natural. You yourself are a gun-owner that is responsible and cares about safety, and most if not all gun-owners you know are the same. So, it makes sense to assume that this holds for all gun-owners. At the same time, the less outrageous gun-opponents are much less noticeable to you. Mostly because outrageous things get propagated.

Note that the opposite happens among gun-opponents. They share outrageously irresponsible gun-owners, and presume gun-opponents are reasonable like themselves. To make actual progress on gun laws, we need to start engaging the reasonable part of the opposing side.

This still involves tough choices, because in the end one side wants to restrict gun ownership a lot more than the other side. Gun-owners are afraid to give ground because it might be a slippery slope, and gun-opponents are frustrated that even the most reasonable proposals are rejected.