In the wake of the violence in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, anti-gun groups are throwing gas on the fire by demanding that Congress and state legislatures immediately pass a host of new gun laws in the name of “fighting insurrection” and public safety. They’re not just trying to push new restrictions on our right to keep and bear arms, however. Groups like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are trying to poison the well of public opinion against Second Amendment supporters as well.

Terrorists in @NRA hats stormed the Capitol in an act of treason on Wednesday https://t.co/XnvxMlS28J

— Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (@CSGV) January 9, 2021

.@JoshuaMHorwitz: We have to understand that language about fighting tyranny is racist and understand the power structures it’s protecting. We can give no countenance to any individual right to revolution.

— Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (@CSGV) January 8, 2021

Language about fighting tyranny is racist? Is Horwitz aware that groups on both the Left and the Right believe that they’re fighting tyranny? You would have had to live in a cave over the past four years to have avoided hearing the Left’s calls to #resist the tyrant Trump, but Horwitz simply pretends that never happened in favor of his shameless smear.

That wasn’t the only dumb thing said during a Facebook Live event on Friday featuring CSGV’s Josh Horwitz and Brady’s Kris Brown, who both used the attack on the Capitol as a new basis for their decidedly old calls for more gun control laws at both the state and federal level.

.@KrisB_Brown of @bradybuzz: We need to recognize #gunviolence as a public health epidemic. We need to end the NRA.

— Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (@CSGV) January 8, 2021

The right to dissent is one of the most fundamental rights of a free society, but the Left is pursuing a strategy of silencing all those that they view as a threat. Not only do we have gun control groups calling for an end to the NRA, the major social media platforms have cut off Donald Trump’s access, and Twitter seems to be purging thousands of accounts on the Right. In response, many conservatives began promoting the platform Parler on Friday, but by Friday night Google had removed the app from its store, Apple was threatening to do the same, and there were calls to boot Parler off of the servers used to host the platform.

Oh wow, if they do this (and they might) that will cross a major line. We already saw AWS do this with legal files for 3D printed guns, so yeah I think they might go there. https://t.co/gb7g7ammcB

— jonstokes.com (@jonst0kes) January 9, 2021

This is insanity, and frankly, it’s bound to make things worse. Silencing those you disagree with doesn’t make them go away. It just drives them further into the shadows, more angry and aggrieved than before.

I get that sense that very few people, including gun control activists and those who stormed the Capitol this week, are thinking about the consequences of their actions. Continuing down this road is going to take us right off a cliff, but millions of Americans are angrily marching along, too intent on destroying the enemy to see the warning signs urging us to find another path.