This week’s QotW comes from the comments on the “No one is coming for your guns” post courtesy of Antonio who resides where the gun control crowd did what they ultimately want: confiscation.
Antonio February 15, 2013 at 23:11 ·
I am a Canadian. I happened upon your website not too long ago and enjoy reading your blog – keep up the great work.Reading this particular piece, about ‘no one wanting to take your guns away’, i find i need to add my two cents if you’ll take it. As you might or might not know, our ‘gun control’ laws in Canada are pretty much useless. They were a knee jerk reaction from a political party looking for votes. They are a major headache for law abiding hunters and shooting enthusiasts. No one bothered to tell the politicians that criminals don’t worry much about firearm acquisition certificates or gun registration.Confiscation is EXACTLY what your anti-rights supporters are looking to accomplish. If not today, then tomorrow. I am living through an environment right now where a certain model firearm is okay today, and deemed unfit tomorrow, and confiscated by the feds without any compensation for your property.
Do not kid yourself into thinking there is some higher, loftier objective – what ever law they put forth, however nice they want to coat it, it will open the door to other legislation that will eventually lead to confiscation.
Your government is reacting in a knee jerk fashion. It is plain and simple – its scary how it mimics what we went through. Whatever headway they make today into gun control legislation will lead to more and more.
Now is not the time to let your guard down. Good luck!
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TTAG has a few regular commenters from the UK and one that claims to be Aussie (or former Aussie, can’t remember), and they have all posted variations on this comment at one time or another. “Cautionary tales,” if you will. (We also have a couple of “Piers Morgans” that post regularly. That is, commenters from the UK but who now reside in the US who attempt to argue the Civilian Disarmament Movement’s side.)
Closer to home, my “home range” here in Orlando seems like it must be on some sort of guidebook list for visitors from the UK on holiday. It’s rare that I go in there and there’s not at least a couple people shooting that have UK accents. It’s an experience that only happens at that particular range. I have struck up conversations with them from time to time, and they have said effectively the same things as have been related here. One guy said his friend has a “quite large” collection of AK variants, nearly 100, that he’d been building for years. When I asked how he still had them, if he got a variance or something, the answer was that they had all been de-mil’d. Those were that guy’s options: de-mil ‘em or turn ‘em in. He described it as “a bloody shame.” They virtually all said “You Don’t Know What You Got ‘Til It’s Gone” or words to that effect, and that while they were shooters in the UK before the ban(s), nowadays they find it just to cost & time prohibitive to jump through the hoops to continue the hobby. More time spent on bureaucracy than on the shooting.
That’s what they’re aiming for here. Small nibble after small nibble, until it’s too much of a hassle to bother. Soft prohibition. Stay vigilant.
*too cost & time prohibitive…
I suppose I should be grateful having only one error composing on a 4.5″ phone screen.
The current policy is not a “knee jerk reaction.” It is a deliberately intentioned policy being undertaken by politicians who fully understand that the measures will be ineffective at curbing crime.
Here’s the DOJ memo explaining why the policies they ask for won’t work: http://www.nraila.org/media/10883516/nij-gun-policy-memo.pdf
They know what they are doing, they have been informed that the criminals won’t be affected, and they do not care. Their goal is not to protect the public or reduce crime.
@Matt – that’s a pretty good job for writing from a phone. If I’m writing more than a few sentences, I’ll generally wait until I’ve got a real keyboard.
That said, you’re right. Death by a thousand cuts. I think that’s why it’s good to keep pushing further in the pro-gun side of things in states where we can (AZ, FL, TX, etc). Even in super gun friendly states, there are plenty of ways we can progress.
@Chris from AK – I think that depends on which group of politicians we’re talking about. The liberal elite? Yeah, they’re well aware of it, and won’t suffer any consequences from voting for gun control.
The useful idiots that will get on board because it’s “for the children” and will subsequently be ridden out on a rail come next election season? Those are the ones who are making knee-jerk reactions. They’re the ones listening to their vocal (but small) group of constituents calling for gun control and will make a knee-jerk reaction thinking it’s for the best. We just have to keep being thankful that nothing has come to a vote (time is our friend here), and keep pushing our congresscritters hard to make sure they don’t do the wrong thing.
And that is the annoying thing about the whole “gun control” debate, or a least one of them – we have countless examples of countries where “gun control” not only does not work, but also where the supposed “slippery slope” turned into cold, hard reality as law-abiding citizens and subjects were unjustly deprived of property against their will and without anything even approximating fair compensation (not that “fair compensation” would excuse the unjustness of the whole thing). Sure, they scream, ad nauseam, that the same thing could not happen here… just like the practice of unjustly imprisoning American citizens without benefit of due process and solely because of their genetic composition would never happen here either.