AP Photo/Steve Helber, File

Right now, much of the news surrounding guns is about New Zealand, and understandably so. What happened last week was horrific. There’s no other way to describe it. Forty-nine people lost their lives to a madman. There’s nothing about that which isn’t evil.

In his manifesto, the killer clearly stated he wanted to trigger gun control here in the United States to spark a civil war, one he figures would divide the nation down racial lines.

Now, anti-gunners are wanting to give him just that, despite years of warnings of what will happen should anti-gunners push too far.

In the discussion of why gun control won’t go as far as New Zealand’s knee-jerk reaction, I came across this argument:

Putting that aside, gun-reform activists say the question of why New Zealand has managed to accomplish what the U.S. hasn’t could come down to the NRA’s success in pushing a “slippery slope” narrative.

The pro-gun argument goes that any modest firearms reforms, such as restricting the sale of AR-15 assault rifles, will lead to broad legislative overreach to take away all guns.

“There are already people calling for broader bans,” Voloch said. “For all that people talk about these military-style semi-automatic weapons, they’re not materially more lethal than other kinds of weapons, especially other kinds of semi-automatic weapons.”

Fears about a “total” weapons, ban, he said, would be “totally plausible” to many Second Amendment absolutists.

Voloch knows what he’s talking about on the issue.

However, claiming the National Rifle Association is merely good at “pushing a ‘slippery slope’ narrative” ignores the history of gun laws in this country.

Every step along the way, there’s been someone saying that we need this one law — just one. Gun owners have complied…only to find another gun law coming down the road.

Every time, we’re told we need to compromise. We need to be reasonable.

However, a compromise involves both sides getting some of what they want, but not everything. What do we get out of new gun laws? At best we get laws that aren’t quite as restrictive as anti-gunners would prefer. We’re still losing ground.

Worse, is that there’s always another gun law being suggested.

The “slippery slope” isn’t just a narrative; it’s the reality we live with each day. The reason the NRA has been able to advance this idea is that they don’t have to spin anything. They can point to history.

We’re not facing a slippery slope; we’re already heading down it because our forefathers tried to be reasonable.

The problem is, it doesn’t work. We’re done being “reasonable” with people who will demand everything and offer nothing in return. They weren’t willing to work with us for, say, suppressors in exchange for bump stocks. They aren’t offering us a damn thing. They refuse to give any ground except in legislation that isn’t even law. Instead of a 5-round magazine capacity limit, they’ll settle for 10-round limits. The problem for them is we figured out we could say, “How about no limit instead?”

Worse, we can make it stick.

We stopped being “reasonable” because you can’t be reasonable with unreasonable people.

The slippery slope isn’t a narrative; it’s a fact. There will always be more gun laws desired by these people. There will always be another push, another effort, all designed to disarm us.

What bothers them is that we finally realized what was going on.