Some people have a firearm. Others are actual gun owners who recognize that maintaining their ability to continue owning that gun requires holding the line.

This op-ed writer, if he actually is a gun owner, is clearly the former of the two, a typical Fudd.

hey’re going to take my AR-15.

Not today. Not next week. Probably not even next year.

But eventually it’s going to happen. Or, at the very least, they will stop me and others from buying another one.

And when that happens, I won’t blame just my gun-controlling political enemies.

In a bit, you’ll see why this line makes me chuckle.

Instead, I also will blame allies in the gun-rights community who will make it possible by laying the groundwork for the George Floyd-like tipping point that inevitably will come. Just as Floyd’s death inexplicably catalyzed a movement in a way no prior videotaped police murders had done, there will be a large-scale killing with a semi-automatic rifle that will do the same for the gun-ban movement.

Now, that’s a bold claim. Does the author defend it? Not particularly. He claims that someone will have an open casket and people will see the carnage such weapons can create or something like that, turning the public soundly against gun owners, but the evidence he provides is shaky at best.

But the claim itself isn’t the problem for me. I might disagree, but not vehemently enough to write about it.

It’s where he goes from there that bothers me and makes his Fudd credentials so blindly obvious.

Most Americans – and all responsible gun owners – know it is asinine to allow someone to carry a gun with no permit and no training, as more than two dozen states now do.

Americans already realize letting most private gun sales go through without a background check to keep weapons away from those who shouldn’t have them – which gun-rights proponents claim to want to do – makes no sense.

Most Americans know that limiting magazine size, so that mass shooters have to stop and reload – giving victims the chance to escape, or the “good guy with a gun” a better chance to intervene – will save lives.

…

All of which means a smart gun-rights lobby will do what it can now to allow measures that can act as a safety valve, relieving the pressure for more outlandish proposals that could come later. A smart gun lobby will take advantage of liberal extremism – think former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ridiculous move to mandate no more than seven rounds in a magazine, or current Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Orwellian effort to ban virtually all concealed carry – to position itself as the sensible side in the debate.

So really, the argument is that we’re going to get gun control because we won’t push for gun control?

Sweet dancing Elvis on rocket-powered rollerskates, that is the most braindead “reasoning” I’ve literally ever heard.

Oh, I get the concept–advocate for more reasonable restrictions as a counter to the most extreme–but there’s a problem with that. The problem is that the extreme will still exist.

For decades, we pretty much did as this Fudd advised, and guess what happened? The anti-gunners just simply kept pushing until we capitulated again and again. They figure out pretty quickly that they can move the Overton window by pushing for more and more extreme measures, then settling for what would have been too extreme a few years prior.

But then again, Fudd here has also set up a No True Scotsman fallacy at the start of this quoted section. His “all responsible gun owners” bit is meant to exclude, well, most gun owners. That way when a gun owner calls him out on it, he can simply claim they’re not reasonable and thus are irrelevant.

Which is why I did a similar thing at the start of this post by presenting a definition that excludes him.

Then again, if someone’s answer to preventing something like an assault weapon ban is to bow down to other restrictions along the way, it’s kind of hard to feel bad for excluding him from our numbers.

Capitulation doesn’t stop someone’s advance. The history of gun control in this country is ample evidence of this. Frankly, we don’t need Neville Chamberlin. If we want to prevent an assault weapon ban, we need Winston Churchills.