There are a ton of people out there that want gun control. They are bound and determined to restrict your rights no matter what. They don't really care what the Constitution has to say about it, either.

Which, in and of itself, is fine. People are free to be quite wrong, after all.

Unfortunately, sometimes those wrong people run for office. To make it worse, they try to pretend they're being reasonable.

[Democrat Kathy] Lennon said she believes in protecting the Second Amendment rights of responsible gun owners. Her son hunts and is a gun owner, and she said she is not against that.

Lennon said she thinks legislation should be passed to address gun safety issues, particularly safe storage laws that would further restrict the ability of gun owners to leave loaded guns in their vehicles.

She is also interested in the implementation of extreme risk protection orders in Tennessee -- orders that would enable law enforcement or immediate family members to petition a judge to remove firearms temporarily from a person who is believed to be a risk to themselves or others.

Gov. Bill Lee proposed gun safety legislation encouraging stronger background checks and an order of protection law on guns in the spring of 2023 after a shooting took place at The Covenant School in Nashville and six people were killed. This year, Senate Bill 2763 -- which does the opposite of Lee's early gun safety proposal -- passed through the Tennessee Senate and was signed by Lee in May. The bill prevents extreme risk protection order legislation from being adopted and also prevents agencies within the state from accepting resources to enact such legislation.

Lennon said she wants to find common ground to keep the community and schools safe. She said that children should not have access to guns and that safeguards need to be in place to prevent guns from entering schools.

"I think it's on the adults to be adults, and if it means to have a few stricter laws in place, then I'm ready to have those hard conversations," Lennon said, "because I do not want a tragedy to happen like Covenant in Nashville again."

So, by this, it's pretty clear that being an adult means having restrictions on our rights, yet she also says she wants to find "common ground."

I hate to break it to Lennon, there is no common ground on guns. There are only those who want to take and those who are expected to give up.

At no point has an anti-gunner offered a compromise that gives us anything. They don't suggest that maybe we could, say, open up the NFA registry on machine guns in return for making AR-15s NFA items. I wouldn't support putting AR-15s there, but at least they're trying to give us something.

Instead, compromise simply means taking a little less than they wanted to.

At least, it means taking less right now.

Invariably, people like Lennon try to pretend they're being reasonable, will take a little less, and then? Then the next legislative term, they're pushing for still more restrictions. They don't even know if what they just passed yet will work, make things worse, or do nothing at all. They don't care. They just expect us "to be adults" and just accept whatever they demand simply because they try to appeal to people's emotions.

There's no middle ground on guns because people like Lennon have a long history of saying they only want this right up until they get it. That's when people figure out they want so much more.