An article in The Federalist this week, written by someone whose biographical information doesn’t indicate expertise in anything to do with the right to keep and bear arms, says “If Republican politicians had half of a brain, they would demand that any restriction on firearms be paired with a zero discretion policy, meaning [that charges for violating such restrictions] could not be reduced” by “left-leaning district attorneys.”
No, that idea might appeal to Republicans who betray the Second Amendment when it’s convenient—like Mitt Romney, John Cornyn, and—I suspect, if given the chance—Nikki Haley—but it should be rejected by everyone else.
Instead, “Republican politicians” (and voters) ought to recognize two things.
First, Democrats push for firearm restrictions for three reasons.
Reason #1 — Ranting about guns rallies hard-left Democrat voters, upon whom Democrat candidates in “purple” district or state elections that cannot be stolen depend. It rallies them more than “racism” and “reparations,” more than “the patriarchy,” more than “climate” fanaticism, more than the multi-faceted sexual perversion agenda, more than abortion, more than masks and vaccines, and more than anti-Semitism.
Reason #2 — Anything that would deprive decent people of guns would reduce their ability to defend themselves against criminals. Civilian disarmament activists dispute that gun ownership deters criminals. But some years ago, a federal survey of prison inmates found that a large percentage of them had decided not to commit one or more crimes because they were afraid their prospective victims were armed, and that they were more afraid of armed private individuals than of the police.
Furthermore, as civilian gun ownership soared over the last three decades, violent crime rates decreased to historic lows, until 2020, when Democrats began encouraging riots, defunding police departments, and refusing to prosecute people arrested for violent and property crimes.
Democrats want people to be unable to defend themselves against criminals, and for crime to increase, to destabilize society—a nihilistic goal in and of itself, and also a necessary precondition to erecting a Marxist dystopia where America—the pinnacle of Judeo-Christian Western Civilization—once stood.
Reason #3 — A disarmed population would be unable to resist the tyranny that hard-left Democrats want to impose. Beginning with the French Reign of Terror, leftist dictatorships have uniformly disarmed their civilian populations, then rounded up their political enemies and murdered them. Leftism originating in the shortcomings of human nature, and human nature having not changed since Day One, it would be no different with a leftist dictatorship here.
The second thing “Republican politicians” should understand is what the Supreme Court said in NYSRPA v. Bruen (2022), that restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms that are outliers in American history are unconstitutional. And firearm restrictions that Democrats demand—such as outlawing firearms best suited for the purpose for which the Second Amendment was adopted (defense against tyranny), registering all firearm sales (so-called “universal background checks”), and “red flag laws” that confiscate people’s firearms on the basis of innuendo without due process of law—are outliers.
© Mark Overstreet 2023