"We don't want to take your guns," they say. "We just want some commonsense gun reforms."
Of course, that's not true. We know it's not true because while things like assault weapon bans start as just an end to future sales, they eventually turn into registration and later, confiscation.
We've seen the steps taken, and too many people have said that quiet part out loud.
This came up with David Codrea pointing out something along those lines at Ammoland on Monday.
“[O]n a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building,” an Op-Ed column by retired diplomat and editorial board member Dan Simpson in the Toledo Blade titled “The disarming of America” demanded. “All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm.”
OK, but that’s from 2007. Why bring it up now?
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Especially since the piece, written by a member of the paper’s editorial board as opposed to “written by members of the public … to ensure they present diverse opinions on topics of importance to readers,” was presented as an “op-ed.” The Blade is all about gun-grabbing, with editors wringing their hands and second-guessing successful DGUs (defensive gun uses) because:
“[W]e’re not sure that store owners and employees defending themselves with deadly force is an absolute good. [I]t must be remembered that robbery is not a capital crime, and it’s only by chance that no one other than the would-be robbers was injured. We fear the result might instead be that bad guys will get bigger guns and be quicker to pull the trigger.”
The point of rehashing all this now is to remind younger gun owners that citizen disarmament and its resultant monopoly of violence, repackaged by the prohibitionists now as “commonsense gun safety laws,” has always been the goal.
Of course they’re talking about taking your guns, and any protestation to the contrary is simply a calculated lie crafted to give talking points to fanatics and keep the uninformed from looking at the documented history of the modern “gun control” movement, where its founders admitted they would do things in increments with the ultimate objective of total bans.
Now, some will dismiss the odd op-ed from 2007 as unimportant. Yes, one person called for disarmament and made a terrible argument for it, but clearly, that's not the majority of gun control advocates, right?
Well, just two years ago, noted gun control activist Gabby Giffords, founder of Giffords, was famously quoted as saying, "No more guns."
But they support the Second Amendment, anti-gunners will claim. They're not in that camp.
The truth is, though, that many of their supposed camp has no such support for the right to keep and bear arms. They want the Second Amendment gone.
USA Today editorial board member Carli Pierson did the same in 2022 by demanding a "repeal and replace" of the Second Amendment
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens also made that argument in 2018.
Cam took the latter two to task back in 2022, which you should read, but the point remains that Codrea is absolutely correct.
Now, are there gun control advocates who are telling us the truth? Maybe, at least as they see it. However, few can seem to give me a line that's too far for them. They can't tell me at what point they stop supporting gun control and start opposing it. They say they don't favor total disarmament, but there's a large gulf between that and total respect for gun rights.
Arguably, if one person is permitted to have a single-shot .22 rifle that they must keep disassembled and unloaded, with no more than one right for that rifle, then there's no total disarmament. That's a line I'm not going to get close to if there's anything I can do about it, but is that the line for these people?
More importantly, what about the rest of their fellow travelers? Where is their line, if there is one?
Disarmament is the goal. Do not let them pretend otherwise. Even if they, personally, don't want that, they don't know where they're willing to stop, either, and that's just as bad.
