BY STEVE COMUS
Stricter gun control is on political agendas at the federal, state and local levels for 2021. Truth is that gun control is a misnomer. It is actually people control.
We often hear gun grabbers use the term “reasonable gun control.” Again, a sleight of words. Reasonable gun control is achieved via a smooth trigger pull with crisp sear let-off and no perceivable overtravel. It has nothing to do with someone else controlling the guns owned and used by others.
Deliberate political bastardization of language has become the rule rather than the exception in recent years as control freaks do all they can to subjugate the masses. Although gun control may be little more than a footnote in the overall domination dreams of the enemies of freedom, it is a keystone in that sheeple cannot be herded easily when they have the means to determine their destinies.
Direct efforts to ban guns, confiscate them and rid the
planet of them are obvious and continual. But the gun grabbers realize it is unlikely that they ever will achieve a gun-free society in one or even several steps. Rather, they focus on tightening the noose so to speak, by confounding the personal ownership and use of firearms.
When outright bans are not practical, enemies of freedom do everything they can to make it harder and more expensive for anyone to make guns, acquire them, keep them and shoot them. These goals are achieved in myriad ways. Waiting periods, bureaucratic fees and taxes are ways the gun grabbers make it hard for consumers.
At the manufacturing level, there are things like requiring that unnecessary features be built into or added onto existing models, making it easier to sue gunmakers for the criminal misuse of their legal products or creating expensive and time-consuming bureaucratic hoops through which makers must hop through in order to conduct daily business.
The point is that gun grabbers and their lackeys in government and the media know no bounds when it comes to their ultimate goal — elimination of all firearms. Another bastardized word in their lexicon is “save.” They deceive by insisting that their efforts promoting their dominance over us are being done to “save.”
Sometimes, they talk about saving us from ourselves. Other times they discuss saving the defenseless from social predators. The list goes on and on. Ultimately, however, they are only interested in saving themselves from the collective logic that would put them out of business absent their lies and deceit.
Looking to the future, gun grabbers love to talk about “smart guns.” Again, bastardization of language. A gun cannot be smart, stupid, intelligent or dumb. A gun is a physical object that can’t do anything its own without human input — can’t even rust without the aid of moisture and oxygen.
When antis talk about smart guns, they mean guns that have some mechanism that allows the gun to fire only when the legitimate owner has it in-hand. This illogic comes to us in the form of the lie that such devices prevent unauthorized people from being able to use the gun. Again, the control is over people. Even non-smart guns can’t pull their own triggers.
Then there are the after-the- fact gun grabbing proposals that involve things like firing pins with micro-markers that in theory make it easier for law enforcement officials to track down criminals via guns that they can inspect after a crime has been committed with a particular gun.
There already are and have been many ways to accomplish that same goal of catching the criminals. The real net effect of such a demand is to hike the prices of guns, making them less available to those citizens of lesser financial means. In other
words, deny gun ownership to the poor by making guns too expensive for them to buy.
In answer to myriad government regulations at the various levels, we have seen cascading series of requirements that allegedly are there to save us from ourselves. I’m talking about things like add-on mechanical “safeties” that only those who do not actually handle guns would think might make a difference.
An example is the addition of the safety button on lever-action rifles as is witnessed on the Marlin lever-action rifles. Such redundant mechanical devices
cause many more problems than they solve.
When the grabber/confounders can’t require something that they promote as saving us from ourselves, they push on other fronts where they say they want to save others from us. We’re talking about built-in gun locks here. Such devices have come and gone over the years. The only ones that survive alteration by the owner are those that can be inert in the actual use of the particular firearm.
Examples are the key locking device on revolvers that prevents their action from working when the device is “locked,” or the locking mechanical safety button on long guns where a “key” is used to make it so the button cannot be moved from locked without being mechanically unlocked.
I guess such guns could be called “dumb” guns because they attempt via mechanical devices to achieve the same goals that the “smart” guns theoreti- cally do electronically. Logic is not an element of the gun grab- bers’ arguments.
In fact, there are all kinds of examples where illogic prevails. Witness flash hiders, bayonet lugs and pistol grips on semi-auto rifles. Enemies of freedom have made those features illegal in some areas for semi-auto rifles, but not for other types of guns. I guess that gun grabbers dictate that there must be something unique to semi-autos that makes them sinister when equipped with inert devices that are not so terrible when found on other gun designs.
Criminal misuse of mounted bayonets on semi-auto rifles has not shown to be a valid social concern because such misuse hasn’t happened. Look at it from the other perspective: Does a bayonet lug on a semi-auto rifle heighten its lethality significantly more than a bayonet lug on a single-shot rifle? Same for flash hider and pistol grip. Elimination of them does not, cannot and never will make society safer for anyone other than criminals and despots, which, come to think of it, are the same thing.
Yes, we’re in store for more lying and deceit in the coming year as the gun grabbers make another run at eliminating personal freedoms. Freedom isn’t free and is maintained only through persistence, patience and push back. Evil doesn’t rest.
Steve Comus is a nationally recognized hunting editor with Safari Club International and a WON Guns and Hunting Guns Editor. His column appears every other week in WON and he can be reached at scomus@cox.net.