This time, he put up an article talking about the history of the NRA pre-1977 and how it did support several gun control measures so of course Ladd had to tweet it as damning to all those silly NRA supporters. Winkler finishes:
Next time someone complains about that a modest gun law tramples on the Second Amendment, remind them of the old NRA--and of a time when even the nation's leading gun rights advocates supported gun control.First one needs to define what is a 'modest' gun law.
In 1968, Chicago Mayor Daley Sr. started out w/ the 'modest' measure of registration. For 'protection'. 14 yrs later, the registration offices were closed to any new registrations.
The 'modest' measure of requiring all firearm sales to go through FFL dealers coincides w/ attempts to legislate and litigate FFL dealers out of business.
The 'modest' measure of mandating 'safe storage' increase the expense of owning a firearm double or triple the amount it takes to own one and can only be used after the fact unless the authorities start unwarranted searches/inspections of homes as they do in Australia.
There's a reason there was a revolt in 1977. All the 'modest' measures kept adding up and they saw the writing on the wall. Through Chicago, Washington DC, England, and Australia to name a few, we've seen the end result of 'modest' measures.
The advocates of more and more 'modest' gun control brought the new NRA on themselves.
3 comments:
My personal metric is does it have a demonstrable increase in public safety.
The Bottom line is most gun control efforts (modest or extreme) Accomplish NOTHING, OR make the public LESS safe. Also many rules are 100% redundant, like banning the private sale of firearms, or requiring a permit to own, to keep prohibited people from buying guns...which is already a crime.
As they say "Gun Control is what you Do instead of something", and generally the laws accomplish nothing if they don't HARM...certainly they never do a lick of good, which is the best reason to oppose such laws.
Yes, and Winkler acknowledges in the early pages of Gun Fight that although he considers the "extremists" on the pro-gun side (that's us) to be somewhat paranoid, that paranoia didn't just rise up in a vacuum--gun owners are paranoid that the anti-rights crowd wants to ban everything and deny any right to keep and bear arms at least in part because they insist on trying to do those things over and over and over again.
It is the lack of any objective standard, and the inability to formulate one, that is the problem. No one knows what "modest" means. It can mean anything you want. That is the beauty of it to gun-control advocates and causes the paranoia in gun-rights groups and others committed to individual rights.
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