Hey, same experiences here, none of the Nuke officers I know are nearly as nerdy and one track minded as people would think based on their education level/subject areas. I'm friends with about 20 junior officers in the Nuke community and most of them could talk longer about guns and shooting than I could.
In the aviation community, all we do is shoot, ride motorcycles, shoot, drink, other outdoor activities, shoot, study a little and do our jobs when its time. We are not plotting to take away rights or confiscate lawfully owned property and most of us want to avoid the JBTs to the same extent as anyone else does. We jump through the same hoops and deal with the same laws everyone else does (the laws that LEOs get a pass on) in order to practice our hobbies. Nobody likes it, nobody agrees with it.
My lack of good faith and respect for many (not all) in the LEO profession comes from the fact that they are not held to very high standards and consistently get away with crap that would have me out of a job and working at McDonalds. Then they go around expecting to be treated like the .mil, act like they are in the .mil, dress like they are in the .mil and want tens of thousands of dollars in .mil equipment to do their jobs.
Maybe our experiences in the Navy are just anomalies or anecdotes and we are not actually seeing and experiencing what we think we are.
Usually, I pretty much agree completely with everything that comes out of your mouth but I have to disagree with you here.
The military is not a statistically random sample representation of the US population. There was a recent article about this. Most people in the .mil come from the southern or western US and, more broadly, RURAL areas. This is true from published studies as well as anecdotaly, ask anyone from the north who has served how many southern accents they were around at any given time. Ask how many people were from middle of nowhere towns vs major cities.
You are making the same mistake newgunguy is in comparing us to the cops. Trust me, Ive met 1 or 2 people in the military that I could legitimately say knew nothing about guns and had no interest, thats it. Take my OCS class for example a few years back, we had 33 in our company and every single person owned more than 1 gun and every single person had a CCW permit of some type, the majority had multiple CCW permits covering multiple states. People who go through the effort to carry as much as possible where ever they can I would describe as more than the "casual" IDGAF gun owner.
Boil it down, the military breaks shit and kills people. Yes we do some really nice things for a lot of people/countries in between but thats basically what the institution is designed to do. Do you think it attracts many people with no interest in firearms and things that go bang? The cops have a completely different mission but apparently fewer and fewer are getting that memo.