Many of us in the Second Amendment community, and I include myself in what follows, have made some pretty serious mistakes at times. We've talked about the expansion of gun rights when various bits of gun control end. Shall-issue permitting in particular states, the Bruen decision, Hemani, constitutional carry, Wolford, and so on, all were framed by some, including folks in our camp, as expanding gun rights.
And they're not. They didn't expand anything.
What did they do? Let's let Rep. Andrew Clyde from my home state of Georgia tell you.
Gun rights advocates are cheering a recent ruling that will make it easier for people to obtain firearm suppressors and certain weapons, with a business founder-turned-lawmaker calling it "the greatest restoration" of Second Amendment rights in almost a century.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., who founded Clyde Armory in his home state of Georgia before he was elected to Congress, argued that the regulatory barrier was wrong in the first place because it taxed a constitutional right.
"If you can tax something legitimately, then you can actually destroy it through increased taxation. You might, quote, 'have a right on paper,' but you don't really have a right because you can't afford the right. Is that really a right? It's not," Clyde told Fox News Digital.
"So here we are removing the taxation on a constitutional right from a bill that was passed in 1934. And once you remove the tax aspect of it, then you remove the constitutionality of the registration aspect."
"The greatest restoration" is a good way to frame this not only because it's accurate, but because Clyde's framing of this as a "restoration" is what's important here, at least for our purposes.
Our rights are ours from the start. They don't get expanded because they're all-encompassing by design. What's happening is that we're getting them back. They were always ours until the government took them away. Now, they're being restored.
That's important because, as the anti-gunners know oh-so-well, language plays tricks with our brains. Communication is important as a means of sharing information, but it can also be used to manipulate what you think of something. Calling these events an expansion of gun rights means that we are getting something new, that we're being granted a new bit of freedom.
But freedom doesn't come from the government beyond using the military to protect us from invasion and using the police to minimize the tyranny of the thug.
What the government does is take that freedom away. The NFA was a means of curtailing the freedom that already existed, where anyone could order a suppressor from a catalog, have it mailed to their house, all without any paperwork or licensing. What we got wasn't an expansion; it was a small bit of restoration from what existed a couple of years ago, and not even a complete restoration at that.
Calling it a restoration conveys the message, accurately, that we're just getting back what we should have had all along. What we haven't had in 92 years.
Rep. Clyde gets it.
Some of you already get it as well.
Everyone else needs to get it, too.
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