Eh, I think Virginia showed that gun owners are totally harmless: there is no actual line where they will actually do anything meaningful.
On your earlier points
1) Who cares what the 40% who are out of power say? The fact that were retreating now speaks to no ability to hold ground or retake ground. Okay, the ideologically hardcore are pushed out into isolated farms and such in Idaho and other small, irrelevant states. If Texas and Florida can be turned solid blue, so its not conceivably possible for the republicans to win the Electoral college, and theres a comfortable lead in the Senate and house, who the bloody well cares what some people in Idaho or West Virginia do?
2) Guns in Idaho mean nothing to DC or LA.
3) This is definitely a more salient point, though the question is, does it actually eb and flow? Or do we always move left, we just move left at a slower or faster rate. Did conservative influence in the universities increase or decrease over the 80s for example? Did movies become more or less woke? Things seemed to have mostly moved leftward throughout the 80s: nothing was really turned back of much significance. He held the line, but most of what I can see, holding the line and maybe delaying the leftist march by 10 years is all he accomplished.
Reagan clearly did something to slow the trend. Bush looks to have achieved nothing.
5) I'm just not sure guns actually matter all that much: for most people, there is no line where they will do anything, and most when they see they have lost will surrender rather than throw away their lives.