Gun Control Advocates Won't Give Up - What Other Tactics Might They Try?
It's no secret to anyone who is part of, or who has sympathies to, the Second Amendment movement that the Biden administration is openly and adamantly hostile to law-abiding gun owners and shooters. Members of the media are likewise often hostile to the Second Amendment community, and even more so when they don't know what the heck they are talking about. And it's not just guns — Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Congressman Robert Garcia (D-CA) intend to come after our ammo, too.
Even so, an outright ban on all guns seems unlikely to pass either Congress or Supreme Court scrutiny in the near future, although one should make no mistake, that's the end goal; none other than the late Dianne Feinstein said as much in 1995, in a "60 Minutes" interview:
“If I could have gotten 51 votes for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn em all in,’ I would have done it,”
She later claimed she was only talking about "assault weapons," those mysterious spooky black guns that gun-grabbers don't seem to be able to define in any coherent manner. You can color me skeptical; when a leftist/statist tells us what they want to do, it's in our interests to believe them.
Now, plenty of gun owners worry – rightly – about an outright ban and confiscation, including jackbooted thugs showing up at your door with a list of firearms they know or suspect you own. But such a scenario would almost certainly be disastrous; with 200 million gun owners in the country, if only one percent of those folks resist with force, with the guns the government is trying to confiscate, then there is a two-million-strong rebellion in place. That's why I don't see this happening without a lot of preparatory steps. And those first steps are likely to be much more insidious than an outright ban. The gun-grabbers may be wrong, but (some of them) aren't stupid, and they'll very likely go about this methodically.
First, ammunition. There is a bottleneck in ammunition manufacturing, and it's one that hand-loaders can't easily fill. Brass cartridge cases can be used over and over, bullets (at least fairly simple lead-alloy slugs) can be fabricated. Powder may, after a fashion, be manufactured on small scales. But primers? Not so easy, and if one is a hand-loader (as am I — I use my own custom loads in all my hunting rifles and six-guns), you know how scarce primers are of late. How hard would it be for an activist administration to tamp down on the supply of the specific chemicals that go into primers, and are we already seeing the results of this? Without primers, your AR-15 – or your Belgian Auto-5 – is just an expensive club.
Second, allowing crime victims and families thereof to sue gun manufacturers for the illegal use of their wares. This is a perfectly ridiculous proposition, akin to allowing drunk-driving accident victims to sue the car companies for causing the accident, but the gun-grabbers are already trying to do this. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is supposed to prevent this, but activists are pushing, claiming that "gun companies are exempt from product liability" due to this Act. This is, of course, pure road apples; the Act only prevents the gun companies from being sued for illegal use of their products; they are as liable for flaws in their product as any other company. The thing is this: Most gun companies aren’t really big companies. Such a policy of lawsuit-enabling and a round of suits funded by well-heeled Democrat supporters (let’s very quietly mention the name "Soros" here) may well drive most or all of those companies out of business.
And finally, a “violence tax.” This may be the last straw. Say you’re in your place of employment, and the sweet little lady who runs HR drops by your desk to tell you that the federal government has just instituted a “violence prevention tax” that will take, oh, 20 percent of the income of anyone who has ever been the subject of the instant background check required for a gun purchase – which tax applies unless you surrender or dispose of all firearms that the government most assuredly has a record of your owning. This isn’t a case of government thugs showing up at your door with a confiscation order. And you can’t open fire on the little old HR lady who brought you cookies last week. If things come to this juncture, you have very few, if any, good options.
And if you think for a moment that these likely courses of action are not being considered, then you’ve got another think coming, and I think the Biden administration may well be about to disabuse you of that notion. Join up with the NRA or any of the other many and varied Second Amendment groups out there. This is a fight that will go on for as long as one can foresee.
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