On Three Conditions…

I would be in support of legislative ‘talks’ concerning new regulations on guns if the following three conditions were met:

1 – Get rid of the ignorant and the misleading. All of those involved in the talks should only be the well-versed and honest in the realities of guns. Anyone that talks about a gun’s ‘clip’ or ‘handle’ is automatically out. Anyone who calls an AR a ‘high-powered rifle’ is excluded from the discussion. Any display of ignorance of the way guns work or the way gun owners work shouldn’t be given power over the subject. Skip the demonization of the inanimate objects and give honest and well-supported arguments why such regulations should be in place, based on numbers and facts rather than emotional appeals. Anyone who cites ‘think of the children’ without further context gets kicked out.

2 – The hypocrites are out of the game. Anyone involved in any legislation at all should be willing to live under the laws that they propose and/or vote in favor of in the spirit of actual representation, as was one of the founding principles of our country. This goes doubly so for gun legislation. Feinstein and Schumer, in favor of banning handguns for you and I and yet carrying handguns to protect themselves, clearly don’t think highly of the rest of us and should not be in a position to write the laws that we are subject to without having to live under the same restrictions. Any of the other congressmen who live behind armed guards should be willing to legally protect our individual rights to self protection or should be willing to give up their special treatment. Each of us has at least as much right to personal safety as any of them. It’s pretty easy to restrict another’s rights when it won’t affect you.

3 – Consider repealing standing gun restrictions. If our right to own certain types of guns is on the table – if our very property and means of self-defense is to be on the table, so must be any and all existing gun regulations. If the threat at one radical extreme of the conversation is the abolition of whatever you consider to be an ‘assault weapon’, including my semi-auto rifle and my .22-cal pistols with threaded barrels, then the other radical extreme is to repeal the Hughes Amendment, NFA and GCA and return us to the freedom of buying a new gun at Sears or out of the back of a magazine (the paper kind, not the ammo feeding kind), even the fully-automatic varieties and so called ‘destructive devices’. If you want to discuss making it harder for me to legally obtain, keep, and transport my guns; the conversation should include the possibility of me being able to go armed into court houses, Post Offices, schools, and other government buildings legally carrying the gun of my choice, with or without an issued permit.

It is ludicrous to expect logical legislation from those who don’t know the facts. If you don’t know anything about guns, how can you effectively contribute to the conversation? If ‘representatives’ base their arguments on demonstrably false misinformation, whether deliberately or by ignorance, how can they add value to the debate? If you don’t think people should have guns, you don’t get to have guns. This country is based on the philosophy that all men are created equal. It is wrong and contrary to the spirit of our country for you to sign into law that a common person cannot possess God-given right to an effective means of defense from behind your armed detail and your own, personal gun. Therefore, put your money where your mouth is. Too many people claim to want us to be reasonable and compromise without being genuine in their attitudes. I think we can all agree that compromise is a two-way talk. Don’t expect us to cheerfully come to the table when it is so unfairly weighted. Too many people calling for gun control are claiming that we don’t have any gun restrictions in the country, despite tens of thousands of restrictive laws codified in the books of our nation. Acknowledge that those exist, and enter into the debate whether or not they should. If you don’t like these conditions, we should not have the talk at all. If you want to talk about compromise badly enough, you will be willing to meet these terms.

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