The recent gun control debate ignited by last month’s tragedy in Parkland, Florida, has liberals trotting out what has become a favorite Leftist talking point - Australia’s 1996 National Agreement on Firearms, an act which, among other things, severely restricted semi-automatic rifles after after a similarly horrific mass shooting.
Liberals consider the cornerstone of the law, a massive forced gun buyback program, a “common sense” approach to what might otherwise be perceived by gun owners as an unwelcome curtailing of traditional American freedoms. Sure, the government may be forcing gun owners to make the transaction, but exchanging money for items IS capitalism, right? And it sure beats the alternative, a Communist-style door-to-door roundup of weapons that both sides agree would likely lead to civil war.
Don’t get me wrong, I think most true Leftists would LOVE to harness the power of the State to crush liberty-minded gun owners by every means necessary, and if a few of the right eggs are broken in the process, so much the better. But realists on both sides know such a scenario is highly unlikely to happen, at least to a result the Left would want. In all likelihood, open displays of tyrannical force such as openly rounding up certain people groups or door-to-door weapons confiscations are highly likely to result in open displays of resistance, and a civil war that is likely to be fought, and won, by the good guys.
On this matter, right-wing pundits are correct:
On the topic of whether or not citizens could resist “violent tyranny,” Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter writes, “The short answer is, ‘Yes.’ As Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan all teach, a decentralized insurgency with small arms can effectively confront a modern police/military force ... But the bottom line is that two untrained idiots with handguns shut down Boston. What do you think 100 million Americans – many trained and some battle-tested – could do with their rifles?”
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“There is no other way around it: The mandatory confiscation of the American citizenry’s guns would involve tens of thousands of heavily armed federal agents going door-to-door to demand of millions of Americans that they surrender their guns. That. Is. Not. Going. To. Happen,” opines National Review’s Mark Wright.
“Make no mistake, armed rebellion would be the consequence,” writes Varad Mehta for The Federalist in a piece that’s par for the course when it comes to most thinking on the right. “Armed men would be dispatched to confiscate guns, they would be met by armed men, and blood would be shed. Australia is a valid example for America only if you are willing for that blood to be spilled in torrents and rivers. To choose Australia is to choose civil war.”
Even the more sane gun control proponents are wise to the political situation. University of Sydney professor Philip Alpers, who is also the founding director of GunPolicy.org, told the New York Times, “What Australia did was a confiscation of private property under the threat of jail time, compensated or not. That wouldn’t wash in the United States.”
Further, when unduly oppressive laws are actually passed in the United States, such as recent laws in New York and Connecticut passed after the Sandy Hook massacre, they are often ignored by the majority of gun owners and sparsely enforced by the states themselves. “New York and Connecticut authorities so far have shown no inclination to enforce their laws by going door to door to round up unregistered guns and arrest their owners,” Mehta wrote in the 2015 piece. “But that’s what would be necessary to enforce the law. A federal law, therefore, would require sweeping, national police action involving thousands of lawmen and affecting tens of millions of people. If proponents of gun control are serious about getting guns out of Americans’ hands, someone will have to take those guns out of Americans’ hands.”
Sure, it’s hard to argue with Mehta’s logic, at least on the surface. And it’s a good thing for gun owners, right?
Not necessarily, not if you look just beneath that surface.
Consider: If rational minds on the Left know all this, to what end are they still pushing for such laws, especially when it’s obvious that they don’t care whether ANY gun control laws are actually enforced. Not yet anyway. (Remember, it’s always conservatives, not liberals, pushing for enforcement of existing law.)
And yet, they do want more and more laws on the books, and the more draconian, obscure, and hard to keep track of, the better. But why?
Here’s the answer, and it should scare every gun owner in the country:
They want to make de facto criminals out of the majority of the gun owning population.
That way, they can essentially pick us off, one by one.
Without necessarily meaning to, Mehta hits on this critical point in his piece: “A national gun buyback law would turn a significant portion of the American people into criminals,” he wrote. “Residents of New York and Connecticut snubbed their new laws … Compliance with the registration requirement has been modest at best, as hundreds of thousands of gun owners in both states refused to register their weapons. So far, then, the laws have been most successful in creating hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers who feel obligated to break the law.”
If liberals are able to pass any sort of “assault weapons” ban, buyback or no buyback, they know they will make criminals out of several million currently law-abiding gun owners. And even if the majority of those gun owners don’t follow the law now, that won’t make them any less a criminal. They just haven’t been caught yet.
But when the ‘right people’ control the levers of power and the ‘right laws’ are all in place, make no mistake - they will be caught.
Here’s the rub. It’s one thing to hold up your rifle and shout “come and take it,” à la Charleton Heston, before thousands of like-minded people. The Feds aren’t going to come to a National Rifle Association convention and start arresting people, at least not yet. And they aren’t going to conduct door-to-door house searches, arresting gun owners and confiscating their firearms, either. Not yet.
But believe me, under the right circumstances and with the right laws in place, the arrests will come. They’ll come when you’re going to work, or to the bank, or to the park with your kids, or a thousand other places. They’ll come after you’ve used your now-illegal AR-15 to defend yourself against a home invader, or if they spot it during a “routine” home search.
Never, ever underestimate these people and the depth of their evil. Remember, the Cheka managed to fill the Soviet gulags to the brim, and yet they did it quietly, with little fuss and even less armed revolt.
And they won’t need to arrest everyone to make the majority obey. No, they only need a few, and word will spread quickly.
So what will you do, dear AR-15 owner, when the ‘Cheka’ comes for your neighbor, and you know the laws are on the books to prosecute? Will a “buyback” and “amnesty” be enough to convince YOU to acquiesce? You’ve got a job, a wife, kids to raise. When they “come and take it,” is your family worth risking?
No, when they take your guns there will be no civil war. There will be no large-scale revolution, because liberals are experts at pushing that Overton Window enough not to shock the system. Like frogs in water that’s about to boil, people won’t jump until it’s too late.
That is why it’s so important to not get complacent and believe a worse case scenario will never happen. That’s why it’s critical to fight the gun controllers’ efforts to change the law at EVERY turn, using EVERY legal means possible.
Long before they “come and take” our guns, and our freedoms.
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