I have several theories how it will happen, but I’m not going to post them on a public forum. I don’t want to give the enemy any more ideas than they already have.
Well, I’m not afraid to discuss the possible scenarios. The leaders of the gun-control movement are intelligent people, for the most part, so they’ve already thought of this stuff and started implementing it.
In short, our right to keep and bear arms will most likely be lost through incremental legislation, rather than through a bloody, unnecessary confiscation effort. This process is already well under way. We lost automatic weapons in 1934 and 1986. We lost the free commerce in firearms in 1968. We nearly lost semi-automatic rifles in 1994. (More on this later.) Along the way, we also lost the right to
bear arms almost in its entirety.
During all these assaults on liberty, gun owners did little more than complain and grumble. At each small step, the consequences weren’t worth taking serious action. (I’m talking about civil disobedience here, not necessarily armed resistance.) You know the reasons. The new restrictions affected only small segments of the gun-owning community (e.g., “assault-rifle†owners) or created only minor inconveniences (e.g., no mail-order sales).
The future promises more of the same. Next year, the so-called assault-weapons ban may become permanent and may even be expanded. Gun owners will gripe, if this comes to pass, but at least they’ll have their grandfathered pre-ban semi-auto rifles and “high-capacity†magazines, so that’s all they’ll do. A year or two after that, future sales of unnecessarily destructive large-bore (say .50 caliber and up) rifles and handguns, “the weapons favored by terrorists,†will be banned. Some gun owners will grumble, but most won’t really miss those expensive, over-powered monstrosities. As the decades wear on, the gun-control advocates will gradually and in turn target those sneaky concealable handguns, deadly sniper rifles, and destructive pump shotguns, interspersed, of course, with legislation requiring licensing, registration, ballistic-“fingerprinting,†new “safety†features, and “smartâ€-gun technology.
I can hear the voices crying already: “But what about concealed carry? It’s expanding!†Ladies and gentlemen, let me submit to you that shall-issue concealed-carry permits are the biggest red herring of them all. Almost universally, gun owners have embraced concealed-carry “reform,†happily exchanging their right to bear arms for the privilege of doing so. And what the government grants with the stroke of one pen, it can take away with the stroke of another. Moreover, what good will a CCW permit be, after a couple more generations, once concealable handguns have been banned?
All this said, I think that the decisive battle in the RKBA struggle will come next year. The “sunset,†extension, or expansion of the “assaultâ€-weapons ban will tell us which way the struggle will ultimately go. If the ban is made permanent or is expanded, gun owners will have effectively lost the struggle, and it will only be a matter of time before private gun ownership is restricted to single-shot target rifles and small-bore shotguns. If the ban is defeated, then there may yet be hope. Such a reversal would be almost unprecedented in the history of gun control! In this case, the tide can turn. If gun owners then present a
united front, we can begin to roll back decades of immoral, unconstitutional legislation. Groups like the NRA can come to be about actually regaining rights, instead of merely fighting a losing defense of them.
If we fail next year, gun owners will not rise up in arms. They didn’t in 1934, they didn’t in 1994, and they won’t in 2014 when “sniper†rifles and “pump†guns are banned. Instead, their beloved Republican “representatives†who voted to extend/expand the ban will solemnly explain that they “couldn’t allow more assault weapons onto the streets in the middle of our war on terrorâ€â€”right before gun owners re-elect them, that is.
Naturally, there are a few more variables that might factor into this equation, but history is impossible to ignore. Individual rights are continuously lost to government until a revolution or some other social upheaval brings change. Where such upheaval will come from in our era or in the future, I don’t truly know, but I do know that it won’t come from American gun owners. As a group, we can’t even agree on the importance of the Second Amendment to our Constitution, let alone the rest of the Bill of Rights.
~G. Fink