In the post-Sandy Hook slaughter political environment, gun control advocates are growing in both size and stridency. The newly formed Facebook page Occupy the NRA has 22,577 likes. However ad hoc, the group’s got it’s S together enough to organize protestors at gun shows like yesterday’s Stamford, Connecticut event. [NB: When TTAG reporters polled Occupy Wall Street protesters around the U.S., the vast majority were pro-2A.] More anti-gun Twitter sites are appearing, and they’re Tweeting like mad (MADD?). The group that was defining the “debate”—The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence—is being left in the dust, internet update-wise. No question: the campaign to infringe upon your constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms is gaining momentum. Meanwhile, TTAG and dozens of pro-gun internet sites are mobilizing gun rights advocates. A small but highly active part of this coalition is already planning for defeat . . .
After a number of carefully-planned, highly-publicized, and successful raids by the government, one or more will invariably end “badly.” Whether innocents are gunned down, a city block is burned to ash, or especially fierce resistance leads to a disastrously failed raid doesn’t particularly matter. What matters is that when illusion of the government’s invincibility and infallibility is broken, the hunters will become the hunted.
Unnamed citizens and federal agents will be the first to die, and they will die by the dozens and maybe hundreds, but famous politicians will soon join them in a spate of revenge killings, many of which will go unsolved.
Bob Owens’ nightmare scenario grows increasingly, uh, nightmarish. While I’m not saying his dystopian view of Amerika’s future couldn’t happen, I’m not sure it will. It’s gun rights advocates’ job to do everything in their power, legally, now, to make sure it doesn’t.
But one thing’s for sure: as the fight for gun rights heats up, the mainstream media will focus in on militias members, preppers and SHTF survivalists like a cruel child with a magnifying glass over an ant hill. It happened after the Giffords’ shooting. It’s gonna happen again.
But once we’re predicting things, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to imagine that Americans will NOT register their guns. They will NOT turn them in. OK, some will. And some will turn in some guns. But just as they did during Prohibition, Americans will disobey the law and keep their “illegal” guns.
As they do already, both here and abroad. Writer and self-admitted [former] illegal gun owner J.D. Tuccille has an excellent piece on the subject at reason.com:
In fact, New York City’s situation with guns is mirrored in Europe, where countries with tight restrictions also find themselves awash in illegal firearms without any clear parallels for the relatively liberal laws of Virginia or South Carolina to blame. According to the Small Arms Survey (PDF) at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland:
Contrary to widely-accepted national myths, public gun ownership is commonplace in most European states. It may appear to some outside observers—especially Americans—that Europeans have blindly surrendered their gun rights (Heston, 2002). The reality is that the citizens of most European countries are better armed than they realize. …
Regulations tightly control gun ownership in only a few European countries like the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom. In much of the rest of the continent, public officials readily admit that unlicensed owners and unregistered guns greatly outnumber legal ones. …
Even those numbers may understate the case. While the 2003 Small Arms Survey report put the number of legal guns in Greece at 805,000 and illegal guns at 350,000, just two years later, the Greek government itself nudged those figures up, just a tad, to one million legal guns and 1.5 million illegal ones.
I don’t think there’s any way the United States government can take on American gun owners without major blowback. Reading the e-tea leaves, President Obama, Vice President Biden, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Governors Cuomo and Quinn, all the pro-gun control pols have a tiger by the tail. The Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” applies.