MILESFORTIS

Anti-Gun Activist Calls for End to U.S. Firearms Production

The gun control lobby has done a pretty good job of masking its true intentions behind a veneer of “gun safety.” Even though advocates like Gabby Giffords have proclaimed at times that the goal is “no more guns,” folks like Brady’s Kris Brown regularly claim that they’re not opposed to gun ownership but are just in favor of a few “reasonable, common sense gun regulations.”

Every now and then, though, an anti-2A activist tells the truth about what they’re really after. I have to thank Californian Seth Sandronsky for his candor at the lefty website Counterpunch, where he says that while he supports gun control efforts, they don’t go far enough.

Gun production is where the focus belongs, economically and politically. There is no market with politics.

… Politically, the pro-war two-party system is the main obstacle to a ban on gun production. It’s a morbid symptom of the system of legalized bribery (campaign donations) from the gun lobby (e.g., National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, Second Amendment Foundation). This political economy makes corporations and the wealthy richer via their tight control of the local, state and federal governments.

Now, I’d say that politically, the main obstacle to a ban on gun production is the Constitution, not the two-party system, especially since one party is all in favor of curbing access to guns. And while Comrade Sandronsky is upset with campaign donations from pro-2A groups like NRA, GOA, and SAF, he completely ignores the fact that the gun control lobby has donated even more money to anti-gun Democrats in recent years.

Sandronsky insists that the gun lobby “calls the shots, economically, politically and thus socially, at the workplace and away from it.”  As much as I’d love for that to the case, it’s just not true. If it were, the NFA would be repealed, the Supreme Court would have struck down bans on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines years ago, and most “gun-free zones” would be at thing of the past.

The rulers, a demographic minority, have two parties that represent their interests, and it’s time for the majority to have theirs. Demanding a ban on gun production could open the door to that end. The political obstacles are formidable, but what is the alternative if the status quo keeps raising the body count of gun deaths?

It amuses me to no end that Sandronsky believes there’s virtually no difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to our Second Amendment rights. It’s true that no Democrat I’m aware of has come out and demanded an end to firearms production in the United States, but that’s because the idea is so nutty that it would do more harm than good to the gun control movement.

Remember a couple of years ago when anti-gun activists tried to hold a huge rally at the state capitol in Denver, Colorado to demand Gov. Jared Polis sign an executive order halting all gun sales in the state? Sarai Rao predicted tens of thousands of women would descend on the statehouse to ““use the power of white women to repeal the Second Amendment.”

Instead, about 1,000 anti-gun activists showed up, but the leadership of virtually every gun control organization stayed far away. Rao’s protest was a complete flop, because as much as the anti-gun leadership of these groups might want to wipe the Constitution clean of the right to keep and bear arms, they understand that it’s not even remotely feasible to do so right now.

What they’re really angling for is a Democrat-controlled Congress that would pack the Supreme Court full of anti-gun justices willing to overturn Heller and declare there is no right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution, merely a collective right to join a militia, and one that’s been mooted with the creation of the National Guard more than a century ago. If Democrats are ever successful in that endeavor we might see legislation to ban gun ownership outright, but with huge majorities of Americans expressing their support for the Second Amendment to one degree or another, that would be political poison for Democrats.

Sandronsky reminds me of those nutjobs who excuse away the horrors of collectivism by claiming that “real” Communism has never been tried. Their idealism has crossed over into idiocy, and their utopian vision of the future is cartoonishly simplistic. I’m not worried about Sandronsky’s big idea catching on. What really concerns me is the incrementalist approach of the gun control movement, which is willing to take what it can get at the moment, knowing it will always come back for more.