In the last few weeks, we’ve covered a lot of news where it was clear that government officials had no intention of even trying to do the right thing. Let’s review a few of those real quick.
Disingenuous Actions Taken Against Guns
For one, there’s the gun control group in New Mexico that committed multiple felonies, despite being warned by BATFE that they had to properly destroy firearms to avoid breaking all of these laws. Because they’re favored by Democrats (who now control both the state and federal government), they’re getting away with it when you or I would be sitting in jail awaiting trial.
California’s politicians have also been playing games. Instead of respecting the Supreme Court’s NYSRPA v Bruen ruling, they went into lawfare mode. Because they were forced to issue permits to all qualified, they did their level-headed best to make those permits as worthless as possible. When called out on it by a lower court, the Ninth Circuit did what all the anti-gun courts have been doing since Bruen: stay, delay, and impede in hopes that some Supreme Court justices die and get replaced by Biden.
As Kostas Moros (a fellow writer here) pointed out on Twitter/X:
Another lesson to learn from us in California is this: no matter how much you surrender, it will never be enough.
Think about it, getting a CCW permit in CA is like a gun control wet dream (aside from just not giving permits at all of course).
You apply with high fees, you wait months and sometimes years, you do a police interview and background check, a safety course with a shooting proficiency test, and if the department demands it, a psych exam.
Despite all this and despite almost nonexistent crime rates among people with carry permits nationwide, the Democrats in Sacramento still cast us out from all public places, making our carry permits that we jumped through so many hoops to get a nullity.
So next time gun control advocates in your state start saying “reasonable” this and “common sense” that, tell them you have no interest in even hearing their latest idea until states like CA and NY repeal their punitive laws.
A number of other states are doing similar things, both in New York and in many other cases as we pointed out here. Illinois has a new “assault weapon” ban, and almost nobody is complying with its registration requirement. It’s such a (likely intentionally) poorly-written law that even the State Police and other government offices can’t answer citizens’ questions about it. Despite that the registration deadline has passed, the state kept the online registration portal open, but anyone that uses it after the deadline would basically be sending ISP a written confession to a crime. Similar court delay shenanigans have gone on here as in California.
I could write about these abuses and usurpations all day (it’s a long train), but I think I’ve driven the point home. The clowns passing these non-laws are proving to us that they have no respect for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, or simply doing the right thing.
The Deeper Problem This Causes
While the tug of war over gun rights is nothing new (many of us here have been involved for decades), it has taken a nasty turn since Bruen. Anti-gun government officials have gone from fighting with the system to abusing the system for political gain. This practice of abusing public institutions to deny people’s rights and limit their ability to push for reforms has a name: lawfare.
Because they couldn’t win at a rational debate over the Second Amendment and human rights, they’re instead deciding to play “pigeon chess”. A pigeon obviously can’t play chess, but it can shit all over the board, throw the pieces around, and then claim victory. Here’s a great example of Gavin Newsom shitting on the board.
But, the chess board isn’t just a gun rights issue. Playing the “pigeon chess” version of public policy and law (lawfare) makes everyone lose respect for the game. I’m sure I speak for many gun owners both in and out of California when I say that I don’t have any respect for the state now. They’re not trying to improve public safety or have an enlightened public policy debate about firearms, and there’s no amount of appeasement that will ever be enough for them.
When governments play dirty like this for long enough, people will eventually wise up and realizing that they’re playing football with Lucy.
If too many people realize that the rule of law is a rigged game, people like Gavin Newsom will find out to their horror that the rule of law was there to protect people like him as much as it was there to protect gun owners. Political scientists call this kind of a situation a “legitimation crisis” or “crisis of legitimacy”. Some have called this situation “the law of the jungle”.
Whatever we want to call it, this crisis of legitimacy is still in the relatively early stages. I won’t sit here and pretend that only Democrats act this way, either. Republicans have plenty of other issues that they don’t want to play by the rules on, and that behavior also serves to sap the legitimacy of the system in the public eye. If government officials on all sides don’t cut it out, the whole system could unravel and get a bunch of people on all sides killed.
Nobody really wants that.
