Fear of gun laws
I talk to a greeter at my grocery store pretty much and we got into talking about gun control. My position being that we need more laws, and his is that they don't.
I said that more background checks are needed to weed out the unstable and would he like to hunt with a "crazy" person in the woods with him, and he said, "NO."
He knew about Hillary's new stance on gun control - executive order if necessary - and he was hot not wanting her to win. I told him about Bernie Sanders. A few days later, he told me he had checked on that fellow from Vermont and he was interested in him.
I asked what harm would background checks do? And he said that after the government knew who you were and how many guns you had, they would come after you and take them away.
That's what's at the bottom of gun control laws - fear that their weapons would all be taken away. Does NRA teach this?
I told him it couldn't happen because people without guns would fight for the right of others to own guns but so far all the trouble is caused when guns are in the wrong hands. Background checks and gun education might prevent a lot the mass shootings...
I never realized why such fear of gun laws - they have as much or more fear of losing their guns as we have of the wrong people owning them. They have to be reassured it would never happen and maybe we'll get somewhere.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Why reassure them? I want an amendment or two that repeals the 2A and outlaws/confiscates guns. Guns have no place in the hands of civilians in a modern society plain and simple.
This is why I would rather see the Brady Act repealed than expanded. Thank you for such a clear and useful example. I always find it comical when people talk about pushing for confiscation, and then turn around and pick on gun owners for being concerned about further restrictions on gun rights.
It's well documented that gun control advocates are attempting to restrict ownership rights one law at a time. Look at the legislative history associated with firearms in places like California, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland.
Having said all that, I have mixed emotions about the screeds to "ban them all" and "melt them down"...at the end of the day it's good for the firearms business, advocates like myself, and the lobbyists. When you have more money and new supporters to work with...you accomplish things like this:
The overseas examples of England and Austrailia are two places to start- confiscation followed and was enabled by registration.
In the US, we can look at CA in the 90's. When they passed the AWB and demanded registration there was question over if some rifles fell under the law or not, and the state didn't have the answer for gun owners but was putting out conflicting guidance. It was later decided that the weapons were required to be registered and because the issue was in question they allowed a grace period for owners to register. Then, after that, they decided that they didn't have the authority to allow a gave period so they went to all those owners who had made a good faith effort to comply and registered either got visits from LE or letters saying to dispose of them or face felony charges.
Then, you have Chicago where they had mandatory registration and also the IL law that mandates a special ID card for gun owners. Chicago police established a task force that combed the records of people whose ID had recently expired to cross it with the registrations and went demanding they turn over the firearms for detection over what was a minor error in forgetting to renew an ID card. They could have just warned the gun owners they needed to renew to get back in compliance with the law, but instead chose to go full bore confiscation because someone didn't renew their $10 ID card after its 10 year term expired- a lot of them were older folks like WWII vets with war trophy guns they wanted to pass off to their kids.
Then, post Newtown NYC started scrubbing gun registrations and they arbitrarily started declaring firearms previously registered and and legal in the city- even absurd things like declaring a bolt action .22 to be a banned assault weapon.
See the below letter:
Does that prove it will always happen that way? No. But does it show examples of registration being used to later facilitate confiscation? In all 3 cases, it does.
