I’ve always thought the anti-gunners mostly resembled the old alcohol prohibitionists, Carrie Nation, The Anti-Saloon League and the Temperance Movement.
Follow up: definition of the American gun-control movement
I think it’s important to clearly define exactly what our side is dealing with here today.
My impression (possibly inaccurate) of the pre-WWII anti-gun efforts, such as that which brought the 1934 NFA, were that it was a top-down effort. In other words FDR wanted to ban handguns and register all weapons, but the best he could manage through Congress was a practical ban on machine guns. The post-WWII gun control movement seems more bottom up than that and more ideological than just pure power politics. It seems to have begun from the early sixties, then gathered more power during the riots and assassinations of 1968.
What is important to define about the modern gun control movement is their goals and their means. They intend to disarm all the people to the greatest extant possible, and their means is by force of law. Even if there was some majority support for such a position at one time, the gun control movement is a profoundly anti-Republican movement in it’s desire to squash the rights of the minority by force of arms if need be. And now one could fairly say the gun-control movement is anti-Democratic as well since only a small minority agrees with their agenda.
I wouldn’t have a problem with the anti-gunners if they restricted themselves to preaching their gospel of guns=bad and self-defense=vigilantism. But the anti-gunners intend to point the guns of the government at those they despise in order to enforce their will. And that is the real problem.
I’ve always thought the anti-gunners mostly resembled the old alcohol prohibitionists, Carrie Nation, The Anti-Saloon League and the Temperance Movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation
Follow up: definition of the American gun-control movement
I think it’s important to clearly define exactly what our side is dealing with here today.
My impression (possibly inaccurate) of the pre-WWII anti-gun efforts, such as that which brought the 1934 NFA, were that it was a top-down effort. In other words FDR wanted to ban handguns and register all weapons, but the best he could manage through Congress was a practical ban on machine guns. The post-WWII gun control movement seems more bottom up than that and more ideological than just pure power politics. It seems to have begun from the early sixties, then gathered more power during the riots and assassinations of 1968.
What is important to define about the modern gun control movement is their goals and their means. They intend to disarm all the people to the greatest extant possible, and their means is by force of law. Even if there was some majority support for such a position at one time, the gun control movement is a profoundly anti-Republican movement in it’s desire to squash the rights of the minority by force of arms if need be. And now one could fairly say the gun-control movement is anti-Democratic as well since only a small minority agrees with their agenda.
I wouldn’t have a problem with the anti-gunners if they restricted themselves to preaching their gospel of guns=bad and self-defense=vigilantism. But the anti-gunners intend to point the guns of the government at those they despise in order to enforce their will. And that is the real problem.