I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past week detailing the potential concerns for gun owners in a Biden/Harris administration, but maybe I’ve just been wasting my time.

According to Thomas L. Knapp, the director of the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, gun owners have nothing to fear from a Biden/Harris administration because Americans already possess an arsenal of hundreds of millions of firearms that they’re not going to willingly hand over.

More than 100 million Americans own nearly 400 million guns, and have no intention of surrendering those guns. Furthermore, Americans can build relatively sophisticated weapons with relatively inexpensive machine tools and/or 3D printers, and very basic firearms with items found in most homes.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t have to like those facts. They’re facts whether Joe Biden and Kamala Harris like them or not.

And if they decide to get pushy about it? As few as 1% of those gun owners could, and almost certainly would, make the Civil War look like a day at the children’s petting zoo.

Yes, politicians will make impassioned speeches to roust votes and campaign donations out of the ignorant and fearful. They might even get some token legislation passed for gun owners to ignore and for politicians to ignore gun owners ignoring.

But they know any attempt to impose real “gun control” would be political, and possibly literal, suicide.

Going by Knapp’s argument, gun owners also shouldn’t have been concerned about the Gun Control Act of 1968, or the 10-year ban on “assault weapons” imposed by Biden’s 1994 crime bill, state-level gun and magazine bans, red flag laws, subjective gun licensing standards, or any other current or proposed gun control law that doesn’t involve the attempted mass confiscation of firearms because it’s not “real” gun control.

That is, in my opinion, an absolutely silly argument. “Real” gun control doesn’t just involve confiscation of firearms from legal gun owners; it also includes any attempt to curtail the average American from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. As we reported yesterday, Joe Biden is apparently already looking at ways to impose his ban on AR-15s through the regulatory power of the ATF instead of the legislative power of Congress. Knapp may not be worried about that, but I am, and you should be too.

Call me crazy, but “don’t worry about gun control because if they try to take our guns we’ll just have a civil war” doesn’t sound very soothing. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to do everything possible to avoid a civil war in this country. I agree with Knapp that any attempt at widespread gun confiscation would lead to mass disobedience, but I also believe that most anti-gun activists and politicians are already aware of the fact that millions of gun owners wouldn’t bend the knee and hand over their guns. That’s not what they’re aiming for at the moment.

While the long-term goal of the gun control movement is to turn America into a giant gun-free zone, the short term anti-gun agenda is to reduce the number of legal gun owners through a variety of means; from gun bans and restrictive licensing laws to increased taxes on firearms and ammunition and making it illegal to purchase ammunition online, with dozens of other proposals in between. The “token” gun control laws that Knapp refers to still come with real consequences for our rights, and gun owners can’t simply ignore them.

Or, to put it another way, would Knapp argue that his fellow Libertarians shouldn’t worry about the War on Drugs because police aren’t going door-to-door arresting people for smoking pot? Of course not. Even without a massive and widespread crackdown on cannabis users, plenty of people still get arrested and charged for having small amounts of weed on them, and the last time I checked Libertarians weren’t okay with that. Why does Knapp seemingly believe it’s different when it comes to guns?

Even without an attempt to confiscate firearms from legal gun owners, Second Amendment activists should be concerned about the gun control agenda of the Biden/Harris administration. Any anti-gun proposal that targets legal gun owners and their right to keep and bear arms should cause for alarm, and if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are running the country for the next four years, they’ll be doing their best to impose “real” gun control laws on all of us. To pretend otherwise is simply burying your head in the sand.

Thomas L. Knapp may not be worried about the ways a Biden/Harris administration could infringe on our Second Amendment rights, but I am, and you should be too.