Gun Control & RKBA

I think discussions of this nature could find a lot more common ground. When I first started posting on DU circa 2004-2005, I floated a few proposals that I thought might could be a productive middle ground. I don't recall all of them, but universal background checks (with felony criminal penalties for abuse of the system, such as compiling a registry), a tax credit for the purchase of UL-listed gun safes, and such were a couple I remember. There were more.

That was before it became clear that the real goal of the gun control leadership isn't to reduce violence, but to reduce lawful ownership by the non-violent, which is why the #1 priorities of the gun control lobby are banning the most popular sporting rifles, and restricting/banning lawful concealed carry. I think the reasons are complex, and range from elitism at the Bloomberg/Wall Street/corporate-media level (you don't see them advocating to take guns away from corporate security and elite bodyguards, do you? just from the working class and middle class), to a variety of issues on down the line. But the goal is not violence prevention, it is ownership prevention. Just look at California, or what the gun control lobby is now proposing at the national level.

In that environment, compromises such as those I once advocated---or prior compromises that gun owners made, such as the ban on all automatic weapons, the ban on armor-piercing handgun ammunition, requiring a license in order to carry, ownership bans for certain people---become weapons to be used against lawful ownership itself, and until that changes, I think you'll continue to see mistrust of all such proposals. For example, had gun owners ever thought that a veteran appointing a financial representative to help manage his/her Social Security benefits would be later used by the gun controllers to label him/her a "mental defective" barred from gun ownership for life, there would have been a lot more opposition to some of those bills. And when the people pushing "mandatory training" or "safe storage" or "universal background checks" are simultaneously talking about compiling registries, banning and confiscating the most popular guns or else, and outlawing self-defense, it undermines even the proposals that might have some merit.