We’ve chronicled some “interesting” statements made by supporters of gun control here at Bearing Arms over the last few years. A constant note of quasi-religion mania has always hidden in their voices,  and it is often instructive when they get particularly excited and they go off-script… an occurrence which almost never ends well for them, as they tend to reveal more about how they feel about the average American than they should.

The most recent example of a gun control supporter letting the mask slip is when the head of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, the ironically named Leah Gun-Barrett, let her true feelings be known about gun owners after she debated NRA board member Scott Bach at New York University, and what a slip it was:

The most revealing and disturbing moment of the debate came during the Q&A.

Ms. Gunn-Barrett candidly laid bare a basic premise of the gun ban mindset that usually goes unspoken: there’s no such thing as a law-abiding gun owner.

“You can be perfectly law-abiding one moment,” said Ms. Gunn-Barrett during the debate, “and then the next moment you can be a criminal and do something criminal and wrong, like shoot up a movie theater, or kill your spouse during an argument.” Regulation of people and behavior is needed, she said, “to protect us against our own stupidity and our own irrationality.”

In her warped view, we are all just ticking time bombs, waiting to go off. A law-abiding citizen could go on a murderous rampage just as easily as exceeding the speed limit. One minute we can be good, and the next moment we can become monsters.

That viewpoint explains every twisted piece of piece of gun ban legislation we’ve seen, and shows that what these extremists are targeting is legal gun ownership itself, not the criminal misuse of guns. To them, there is no such thing as a legal gun owner, so the solution is to reduce or eliminate gun ownership itself. When the anti’s speak of ending gun violence, what they really mean is ending gun ownership.

There’s no such thing as a law-abiding gun owner. Just… wow.

Bach was quick to note the absurdity of Gunn-Barrett’s irrational view that gun owners are criminals-in-waiting. That daft opinion flies in the face of the fact that gun-owners—and concealed carriers in specific—are much more law-abiding than the average citizen, and they must be, or they couldn’t become lawful gun owners in the first place.

But lurking deep inside Gunn-Barrett’s statement is something else.

Intertwined with the fever-dream of gunowners as people just on the edge of snapping is the cultish belief that guns themselves are talismans that have the capability to cloud the minds of the sane and turn them towards violence.

We noted this absurd belief in the power of firearms as talismans of evil when gun control advocates fixated on the rifle instead of the shooter after the massacre at Sandy Hook.

Why is it that some weak-minded people feel compelled to find a totem or talisman to scapegoat in the wake of a crime committed by a depraved individual? The vicious and terrified backlash against a kind or brand of firearm in the wake of a crime isn’t the act of a rational mind, but instead echoes the same sort of ancestral superstitious hysteria that once swept through New England towns centuries before.

Burn the witch.

Were they not so dangerous in their fanatical certainty that guns are the cause murder, and not simply an easily replaceable implement, it would almost be amusing.

Burn the witch.

These days, a fevered few shriek with the conviction of Cotton Mather that AR-15s (or other firearms, depending on the outrage of the day) are instruments of the Devil, and that Bushmasters and Colts should be burned at the stake as were Goody Glover and Alice Young.

People like Leah Gunn-Barrett, Moms Demand Action’s Shannon Watts, and the Violence Policy Center’s Josh Sugarmann echo the superstitious fundamentalists of Salem, so cock-sure in the certainty of their fears that they pass sentence on the completely innocent citizens and their tools alike without an inkling of remorse.

Facts, logic, and and reason are irrelevant against such opponents. Luckily, such vicious zealotry exists only in small groups, and never lasts for very long.