Herschel Smith thinks so.
There is such a proliferation of gun control and ammunition control articles, commentaries, editorials and laws that it would be impossible to mention them all, let along discuss them. Boulder has just announced a new assault weapons ban. The LA Times advocates ammunition regulation, Smith & Wesson will soon be under pressure from its parent company, Black Rock Investment is pimping gun free investments, a recent challenge to the Massachusetts assault weapons ban has fallen, bump stocks will soon be illegal, the Las Vegas Sun is publishing letters advocating the confiscation of ammunition, and the News Tribune published a reader who wants to tax ammunition more heavily.
. . .
We could go on for hours and hours over this. The point is that something has snapped in American culture, and we are being put in a pincer movement.
. . .
Furthermore, when bans happen, we’ll all have to decide where we stand, and some of us will have to turn “gray man” in order to live and work in our communities and continue to have a job. Not everyone can be a very public figure like Mike Vanderboegh was.
Unless the culture makes a U-turn very quickly – and I don’t think it will – we are in for some hard times ahead and we will all have to make difficult choices. Put on your thinking caps, stock your supplies, watch your six, consider your options, and make sure of your friends.
There's more at the link. Recommended reading.
In another article, Mr. Smith provides a warning:
Listen to your enemies. Learn from them, especially when they publicly inform you of their tactics. Plan accordingly. By my calculations, Trump (being I suspect a one-term president) gives us about two more years.
I fear he may be right. Note, in particular, this LA Times editorial about ammunition control, and Bank of America's decision to stop lending to manufacturers of politically incorrect weapons. If those aren't the enemy informing us of his intentions and tactics, I don't know what is!
I'm sure most of the readers of this blog are of the same mind as myself. I think the Founding Fathers knew what they were about when they recognized the (pre-existing) right to keep and bear arms in our Bill of Rights. However, they wrote in a time and in a culture where this was self-evidently necessary, and no-one in his right mind would have argued that it was not. Today, many of our people do not have that mindset. Their only encounters with firearms are in the hands of criminals, law enforcement officers and agencies, and the military. They have no personal experience with them at all, even for target practice, much less used them as a tool to provide food for their tables or protection against their enemies. They see guns as scary, threatening and dangerous.
It's all very well to argue that they're wrong, but it won't get us anywhere. That won't change their beliefs or outlook. I don't know that there's any way to do so other than expose them to the reality of firearms, by getting them to shoot and experience for themselves that a gun is just a tool like any other. Unfortunately, opportunities to do so don't exist for most of them, and they wouldn't want them if they did.
Since most of us can't afford to stockpile weapons and ammunition in large quantities, and/or don't have the (safe, secure) storage space in which to do so, I repeat the suggestion for low-cost, effective training that I made several years ago. Buy one or more BB or Airsoft replicas of your chosen defensive weapons, stock up on pellets and air cylinders, and use them for regular practice (see the earlier article for details of how to train with them). It's vastly cheaper than using ammunition and your regular firearms, yet exercises the same skills you may one day need when using the latter. That's an option all of us can afford. At the same time, stockpile what ammunition you can afford, because it's very likely to become much more expensive (due to taxes and regulation) and harder to obtain (due to registration, restrictions on bulk shipments, and other impositions).
The cultural winds are against firearms owners in large parts of our country - and those parts contain the majority of US voters. As Mr. Smith points out, we have to face reality.
Peter
9 comments:
I'm not sanguine that BB guns will be legal in the long run. Given that they're outlawing kitchen cutlery and seizing needle nosed pliers in the UK, for example.
If the purpose is really to destroy the gun culture, outlawing BB guns would make sense. Can't have children playing with BB guns, that will only make them see guns aren't inherently evil and don't do anything on their own.
A blogger whom I follow, Leftist but we agree on some things, called for a decades-long campaign to delegitimize gun ownership all together. Drip-drip-drip on the evening news. Lead each broadcast with the latest "gun violence" and so on. Have ongoing puff pieces that compare the US to other (cherry-picked) countries. All to shift the culture.
This is the thing Breitbart saw: politics is downstream from culture, and is something we on the Right are just now waking up to in earnest: the Left's LONG GAME.
Ultimately, we need to understand that, per Frontpage Mag (frontpageman.com) founder David Horowitz, that the Left is composed of MISSIONARIES. Missionaries can't be turned; they can't be bargained with, or reasoned with. Since they are Enlightened Beings, with Noble Causes, they will persist until the world is Socialist.
We are in a well financed, well thought out and planned propaganda campaign to disarm Americans. And it's working.
Is it? Are you giving yours up?
The BOR is part of a contract between "We the People" and the people WE have elected to represent us. There is no way that the Constitution would have ever been ratified without it. And when they start "repealing" the BOR, we have arrived at the time to use the 2A as it was intended.
Just because the Commies are flooding the mouthpieces they own does not mean they are winning, just that they are noisy.
They mean to rule us.I voted for representation. I will not be ruled.Whether or not you will be is up to you.
"For the security of a FREE state..."
Wake up. BB guns have been illegal in NJ for more than 70 years.
"many of our people do not have that mindset. Their only encounters with firearms are in the hands of criminals, law enforcement officers and agencies, and the military."
Gee, what happened? It is almost like someone removed a shared cultural knowledge and understanding, and intentionally.
John Dewey, the Father of Modern American, considered Marxism very important, even going so far as to say it was “one of the greatest modern syntheses of humane values." In 1928 John Dewey traveled to the Soviet Union with others from the NEA and studied the communist education system. His premise: “You can’t make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society, which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.” Dewey was an atheist, a humanist, and possibly more than anyone else laid the foundations of the current government school system that is destroying the foundations of our Christian heritage and the lives of millions of children. The state education system is the instrument that indoctrinates millions of young minds and hearts every day into atheism, humanism, moral relevance, sexual immorality, and socialism.
But that's okay, keep talking about guns as if they are something more than just a symbol and tool of the liberty that has been intentionally destroyed. Those who continue to argue on behalf of indoctrinating the children, who then grow up as obedient little communists, are complicit in the destruction.
Your BB guns will not save you.
In at least one town in Silicon Valley, it is legal to buy a BB/pellet gun, but not own or shoot same if a resident.
BOA has been anti gun for many years and in the past has taken away lines of credit from companies that wouldn't stop making guns, so this isn't surprising.
No, the culture isn't really turning against guns; just like with the claims that the Democrats will take over Congress in November - there is a small group of very vocal people who are getting lots of media time to push their position; what you don't hear about are the larger and better attended pro gun events, or the facts that many of the laws anti-gun people have pushed are DOA in state and federal legislatures.
This is astroturfing at its worst; the media is trying to make a small movement look bigger than it is, and a few large companies and banks are going along with it. Dicks is already feeling hurt from it; I suspect others will soon also.
Maybe I can offer a ray of hope here. The next generation of young people coming behind us are predicted to be the most conservative generation since WW2. (I'm almost 35, so just barely past them.) Gun control is a losing issue with many young people simply because they are less prone to manipulation. When faced with actual data (like FBI statistics or CDC studies), they tend to listen more. Harvard just recently released the findings of a study where young people surveyed were MORE TRUSTING of President Trump than they were of the "Main Stream Media". Yes, the old guard has a lot of talking heads on the cable channels and print media, but those mediums are dying. Cord cutters are growing up and they consume completely different content than newspaper op eds and the soundbite news shows. Long form interviews and debates, where people express ideas civilly over a couple of hours, are becoming hugely popular. There is a reason why people like Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, etc. are SO popular. Take heart! Not all of us younglings are vulnerable to these tactics. (Also, the Social Just Warrior (SJW) / progressive left is finally showing that they have left classical liberals in the dust. And the classical liberals are realizing it. They are more on the side of conservatives than they are on the side of the SJWs. That will also help in the long run.)
I was thinking on this recently and I think some of it is that US gun culture has gone insular. Lots of gunnies online, living in their own little echo chambers like most people online are, but in public people don't talk about their guns. A lot of gunnies have become reluctant to answer surveys on them, don't like to make themselves targets for the ridicule that comes with being a gunny, and also notably we've stopped trying to take our friends and neighbors to the range. Gun rights made HUGE strides when it was almost a standing policy that most would offer anyone curious a free trip to the range and all the ammo they could shoot (within reason) to learn about guns and to understand us.
I don't see a lot of that anymore, so the average person's experience with a gun owner is no longer their neighbor down the street who took him plinking, it's the criminals in the news (from anywhere) and it's the guys up there with their "From my cold dead hands" rhetoric. And don't get me wrong, making it clear we have a hard line is important, but it's also about as effective at winning people to our side as "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" was for winning folks over to the gay rights movement. Gay rights took off when it wasn't just those "queers in San Francisco" but it was your neighbor, your kid's best friend, or your kid themselves.
Gun rights needs to become humanized again. Real human faces with real human stories. Grandparents with bad hips that protected their grand kid. Bright eyed youth smiling with their marksmanship trophies. 3 generations of hunters and target shooters. We need these images. We need these stories. We know that most gun owners are perfectly common law abiding citizens. Now we need everyone else to know it too. We need our own #metoo movement. Not some aggressive "come at me bro" campaign. Not the doom and gloom of NRA preaching to the choir videos. We need normal, every day people, in normal every day clothes, with normal every day cars to stand up and be counted. To say "Me too, and you too if you want to ask me".
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