Demand for ‘Commonsense Gun Laws’ is the Road to Citizen Disarmament

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Polls show that a majority of Americans want Congress to pass commonsense gun laws,” Dave Saldana asserts for Reader’s Digest in an opinionated hit piece on the right to keep and bear arms posted (under “news,” naturally) on MSN. “These laws would not ban gun ownership or repeal the Second Amendment.”

Reader’s Digest…how disappointing. I guess with all the other woke “capitalist rope-sellers,” seeing them turn was to be expected.

Who Saldana is and what qualifies him as an authority is unclear. What is clear is he‘s a lefty propagandist who cherry-picks what we’re to assume are “facts” from sources with demonstrable anti-gun agendas. And his arguments fall on their faces right out of the starting gate.

What the “majority of Americans want” depends not only on where the polls lead them with calculated questions but also on what they actually know about the “laws” they are being queried on, which in this case, is mostly what the media tells them. That, and rights aren’t contingent on majority rule—otherwise, two of us could do whatever we wanted to one of you.

Funny how when you test them on it, protecting minorities isn’t really what the left wants to do at all. Unless by “minority,” you mean the global elites…

As for the assurance that 2A and guns are safe if you give the grabbers what they want, the rest of Saldana’s regurgitation of tired talking points and goals they’ve let slip for decades show that to be a lie. And since the right it recognizes was not created by the government, something that has been recognized in the Cruikshank and Heller cases by the Supreme Court, repealing the Second Amendment would not eliminate what it was worded to protect, the ravings of retired dotard “justices” notwithstanding.

In any case, saying they won’t take all guns when they have no legitimate authority to take any is more than a bit like saying “We don’t want to rape you, just molest you a bit.”

The only rational response to that is “No. Your move.” Besides, they really do want to rape you.

Let’s look at what this Saldana character is telling anyone ignorant enough to support their own disarmament by a violence monopoly equates with “commonsense”:

• Tell citizens old enough to marry, vote, form contracts, and serve in the military and statutory militia they can’t have guns.
• Ban standard capacity magazines.
• Make gun trafficking even more illegal.
• Outlaw home builds.
• Criminalize not locking up your safety.
• Ban semiautomatics.
• End private sales by imposing registration-precursor “background checks.”
• Impose ammo limits.
• Deny due process through guilty-until-proven-innocent “red flag laws.”
• Abridge the First Amendment — for the children.
• Impose prior restraint “training” and require poll tax-like “insurance” before being allowed to exercise your right.

I decided against fleshing all those bullet points out because we at AmmoLand have been over all of them ad nauseam. There’s probably nothing I could add that regular readers here couldn’t knowledgeably expand on.

By way of authority, Saldana cites lefty think tanks and gun-grabber groups, throwing in a Fudd and a rich disarmament fanatic for good measure. No, of course, he doesn’t include anyone on the firearms freedom side because that’s not his goal. They’re all smeared as the obstacles standing in the way of his “commonsense” Nirvana.

And as for his “saving thousands of lives year” claim, checking just one of his sources gives us a pretty good feel for how the others “justify” their GIGO BS: They infer, they simulate, and they guess. And they still have to qualify their claims with the equivocal word “may,” which also means “may not.” For all of their correlation/causation assurances, their paltry percentage difference claims over categories of storage, carry, and use ignore the fact that the criminals who cause the problems laugh at and ignore every one of the restrictions the ivory tower eggheads (beholden to their paymasters) are trying to impose on the rest of us.

And note they never talk about the thousands — if not millions — of defensive gun uses that are illegal in “sensitive area/gun-free zones.” You know, the ones the CDC tried to remove from the stats at the behest of the citizen disarmament lobby…

The other thing Saldana misses – either deliberately or because he is just a parroting dilettante trapped in a “progressive” talking point bubble, is that say you give the grabbers everything they’re demanding here, who thinks that will be “enough”? (You’ll note Newtown Action Alliance’s Po Murray didn’t deign to reply when I asked her).

We’ve seen the same list before and we know that citizen disarmament has always been and remains the goal. Remember Thomas Dodd, author of the Gun Control Act of 1968, who publicly wished for “abolishing all guns” and to “destroy them all,” and Brady Campaign predecessor Handgun Control  Inc.’s Nelson “Pete” Shields 1976 plot to “take one step at a time [to] make possession of all handguns  … totally illegal”?

Give in on any one point and that’s one less obstacle they need to overcome on their way to more. Of course, they’re talking about taking our guns, and anyone snottily dismissing that as paranoia is ignorant, a liar, or both.

The one hopeful thing about this is the readers aren’t buying it. At this writing, Saldana is getting his a… uh… hindquarters handed to him over in “Comments.” It’s a chance to get an otherwise suppressed message heard outside the “echo chamber,” so why not join in?

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.