Introduction
In the past decade or so, a popular topic of discussion about political discussion (Is “meta-discourse” too pompous a term?) has been the increasing polarization of our political climate. I’m not sure if polarization can be empirically measured or even quantified, but I think it’s fair to say people tend to treat political beliefs as essential elements of identity more than as simple opinions, and that this is more the case now than, say, three or four decades ago. If you’re a student of history, you know nothing good can come out of a climate in which all political disputes are seen as existential struggles. I’m not prepared to go on a rant here about all political polarization or why it happens, but I think the gun control debate has some identifiable factors contributing to its evolution into a highly polarized culture war, and that elucidating those might help defuse it.
If you’re already generally pro-gun, this blog post isn’t really for you. It’s for you to share with your friends, coworkers, and family members who aren’t with us yet, to give them a window into how we think and why we’ve been forced to close ranks and take such an uncompromising stance. If you’re not generally pro-gun and you take issue with statements made here, as I’m sure some will, remember that this is written from my perspective as a Second Amendment advocate. It’s meant to represent our viewpoint, to show you what we see. If you want to change that viewpoint, don’t tell your pro-2A friends we’re wrong and/or stupid and/or evil for standing so firm on this issue, tell the politicians over on your side to undo the decades they and their forebears did and continue to do that made our level of commitment to the cause necessary.
What does “compromise” even mean?
A compromise, to quote the Merriam-Webster online dictionary of American English, is a “settlement of differences by arbitration or by consent reached by mutual concessions” (emphasis mine). Each party must yield some ground so both can meet in the middle. In most firearm-related legislation, though, the only party giving up something they have is legal gun owners, and largely not by choice.
Consider the right to keep and bear arms (RKBA, as we abbreviate it) as existing along a spectrum. At the hypothetical upper extreme, we would live in an anarchic society in which any person is allowed to have any type of weapon anywhere and for any reason. The lower extreme is a little more nebulous, because almost any object can be used as a weapon; for the purposes of this discussion, let’s consider the RKBA’s lower extreme to be a total, universal gun ban. Just about everyone, including the “every gun law is an infringement” crowd, agrees with some level of gun control. Banning violent criminals from owning guns, for example, is technically gun control, but the term “gun control” is so heavily laden with connotation that we don’t think of it that way.
Over the course of this country’s history, lawmakers and lobbyists have periodically come around asking us to shift our society a little bit downward on that spectrum in the interest of public safety. We in the pro–Second Amendment camp agreed with some of those moves, and so were willing to compromise. The NRA was on board with parts of the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 and Gun Control Act (GCA) of 1968, particularly those provisions which restricted transferring firearms to people who are dangerous to themselves and others. The NSSF, the firearm industry’s own lobbying group, was a driving force behind the Fix NICS Act of 2017, which made our national background check system more robust. In the interest of public safety, most gun owners support some basic laws to try to prevent dangerous people from obtaining firearms. The anti-gunners never seem satisfied with those compromises, though. No matter how much of our proverbial pie we give up, they always come back for more.
The NFA took a big slice out of that pie in 1934, and after more than ninety years, we’re only just beginning to get bits of it back. State hardware bans, more slices. The Hughes Amendment in ‘86, another slice. All the while, the only way we manage to claw back any of our pie seems to be through concerted pro-2A political action, not by compromising with our opposition. Tax stamp reform wasn’t a conciliatory provision the antis gave us in exchange for something they wanted, it had to be fought for tooth-and-nail. Shall-issue wasn’t a piece of ground they were willing to concede to gain others, and nationwide license reciprocity still faces heavy opposition. The Firearm Owners’ Protection Act passed because the pro-2A voices in Congress were willing to let a poison-pill amendment slide so they could get the votes to pass the rest of the bill. If the status quo is that we have pie and you don’t, and you demand our pie, a compromise is not you “conceding” and taking a smaller slice than you wanted. You’re still coming out ahead and we’re coming out behind. A compromise is when we give you a slice of the pie in exchange for something we want, ideally another piece of our pie you’ve already taken from us.
The Comically Large Fork
If “compromise” means you get to take a slice of our pie and give us nothing in return, then it is in your best interest to keep coming back and asking for one “compromise” after another until you’ve eaten your fill. History has shown this to be the gun control movement’s strategy, and their appetite is apparently limitless. Early drafts of the NFA, the foundation on which all federal gun laws are built, would have regulated handguns—the most common category of firearm used in self-defense—the same way as machine guns. Even as the NFA stands today, it still includes bizarre provisions such as barrel length requirements and sound suppressor regulation that don’t exist in the gun laws of many European countries. The only way the NFA even gets around the Second Amendment is that, in a very “I’m not touching you” sort of way, it doesn’t outright ban anything, it “merely” imposes extremely strict registration requirements and a system of transfer fees calculated to be so inordinately expensive as to render regulated items effectively unobtainable.
Since then, numerous state and federal laws have been put in place which unduly burden law-abiding gun owners for little or no gain in public safety. We’ve seen ammunition transfer restrictions, ammunition bans, magazine bans, feature bans, import bans, bans on specific makes and models of firearms uninformed lawmakers find “scary,” a notable ban on a shotgun because the name sounded “scary,” near-total carry bans in many states, revocation of reciprocity, revocation of due process under red-flag orders, roster mandates, microstamping mandates, feature mandates, “smart gun” mandates, and more. Every aspect of firearm ownership has been targeted with at least some success: self-defense, sport shooting, hunting, collecting; you name it, and it’s been adversely impacted by some stupid law or other. When they aren’t going after the people, they’re going after the manufacturers with endless attempts to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act and allow tortuous legal harassment of gun companies that follow the law.
Saying the quiet part out loud
I’m sure not all gun control advocates advocate for all gun control, just like how our side isn’t an ideological monolith. That said, I have yet to see any of the largest gun-control organizations or the most prominent politicians on their side announce at what point they’re willing to stop. In fact, the opposite has happened. Have they ever seen a piece of gun control they thought was too extreme? It’s hard to take any “moderate” voices seriously in their assertions, that, for example, they aren’t in favor of confiscation when former representative and at the time presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke stands up and says, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!”
That kind of thing isn’t unusual for them. In 2018, then-Representative Eric Swalwell, now under investigation for the rape of at least four women, penned an op-ed for USA Today calling for mass gun confiscation. When someone pushed back on Twitter, he famously responded with a veiled threat about using nuclear weapons against American citizens. Dianne Feinstein, a leading senator for gun control from 1992 to 2023, was interviewed on 60 Minutes soon after she helped pass one of the worst pieces of federal gun control in our country’s history. Feinstein lamented only that it didn’t go far enough, plainly stating on national television, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them…‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in,’ I would have done it.” Nelson T. “Pete” Shields III elaborated on his organization’s “ultimate goal—total control of handguns in the United States” with a call to “get all handguns registered” and “make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition” (emphasis his), with very few exceptions, “totally illegal.” Haven’t heard of Pete Shields? He spent eleven years as chairman of the National Council to Control Handguns, now known as the Brady Campaign. More recently, Joe Biden, the President of the United States, claimed that “a 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body, and so the idea of these high-caliber weapons [note: 9mm is anything but] is of—there’s simply no rational basis for it…[for] self-protection, hunting…and remember, the Constitution, the Second Amendment, was never absolute.”
That seals it for me. Sure, you can say there are extremists on both sides, but so many anti-gun extremists seem to have the political power to codify their views into law that we simply cannot afford to give up any ground.
All of this has happened before, and will happen again
For our refusal to yield to such extremism, we ourselves are called extremists, but for our justifications therefore, we are branded paranoiacs. The thing is, though, that plenty of the feared worst-case results of gun control have actually happened. These arguments are based not on the slippery slope fallacy but on an understanding of history.
Why is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives legally restricted in how often it can audit dealers who haven’t done anything wrong? Because ATF field agents used to use repeated audits to harass dealers and force them out of business. Why isn’t ATF allowed to crate a searchable electronic database of firearm transaction records? Because agents had a nasty habit of coercing otherwise law-abiding people into technical violations of poorly defined pieces of law and statute. They were intentionally creating criminals because that was easier than going after real criminals. That prohibition hasn’t stopped them illegally copying records, though. Why are firearm manufacturers protected from lawsuits over crimes other people committed with guns they produced? To counter the lawfare strategy of slowly bankrupting companies with frivolous lawsuits. This was a real tactic and the people who want to use it have spent the past two decades whining about it being against the law now. Why, in the long and arduous fight for shall-issue permitting laws, did the pro-2A groups on the front line call may-issue “discriminatory?” Because may-issue has been used as a tool of racial discrimination, as have several other types of gun control laws we oppose. Even when the legislators and activists earnestly wish to promote the general welfare, their laws’ real effect is often to create new criminals out of honest people more than to stop real criminals.
Given this history of gun control always going farther than promised, how can we trust even the ostensible moderates among our opposition that their side will keep its word? They could promise anything they wanted, but there’s no legal mechanism to lend any weight to their assurances that their side won’t push more gun control. After the next round of elections, a new cadre of lawmakers could very well come in and renege.
What happens now?
With all that in mind, what are our options? If we acquiesce and give the antis a slice of our pie, they’ve shown that they’ll only come back for more. To “compromise” means we give away a small slice, then they come back demanding more anyway. In the face of people who have never seen a piece of gun control they didn’t like, that’s untenable. It follows that the only remaining course of action is to refuse any demand—s friend of the show Danny Todd of Gun Freedom Radio and the Arizona Citizens’ Defense League so succinctly summarized it, “We’re not giving up anything because they’re going to try to take it all.” Virginia shows we’re perpetually one election away from losing a big piece of our pie anyway, so we would be foolish not to try to take back as much as we can at every opportunity. We feel like we’re against a wall, but that in the intermediate term, time is on our side. The gun issue is only becoming more cross-cutting, so from our perspective, all we need to do is remain committed to preserving the right to keep and bear arms long enough for it to become politically untenable for political candidates to campaign against it.
The ball is in the gun controllers’ court. For any progress toward a true compromise to happen—and again, most gun owners are not (yet) categorically opposed to any and all gun laws—groups like Brady and Everytown must do a few things.
First, they need to take a hard line against anti-gun extremism. I don’t care how much they say they aren’t opposed to responsible gun ownership if they’re willing to endorse the likes of Swalwell and O’Rourke after those politicians’ noxious statements. To their credit, both Giffords and Brady issued public statements condemning the unlawful killing of Alex Pretti this January, but the latter’s remarks were anti-Trump rather than pro-2A. If they want to position themselves as “gun safety reform advocates” rather than “anti-gunners,” they’ll have to do better with their messaging.
Second, they need to give something up rather than continually demanding we do. Just one gesture of good faith would go a long way toward rehabilitating the gun control groups’ images among the gun-owning public. I’m talking about actual common-sense reform, if you’ll pardon my co-opting the term. Backing the repeal of some import controls would be nice. Backing a bill to allow non-FFLs to file NICS checks wouldn’t be bad either. But I know many within Brady and Everytown would balk at such measures as “caving to the pro-gun side,” and I don’t have much higher hopes for Giffords.
Realistically, I doubt any large, well-established “gun safety reform advocacy” group could survive a proactive move toward compromise. As mentioned above, pro-2A groups have shown they’re okay with some gun control, but the groups we consider broadly anti-2A haven’t shown they’re against any gun control. The way I see it, the latter draw financial land popular support from a large number of uninformed people whose view comes down to “guns are bad and scary.” Can you imagine their response if they perceived their donation dollars as going to make life any easier for us gun owners? They’d revolt in an instant!
Compromise Is Alive. Why?
In case the previous 2,606 words didn’t already make it abundantly clear, I’m not optimistic. There’s one small ray of hope, and it hinges on that qualifier, “well-established.” I’ll cover that in another blog post soon.
