Getting Their Steps In

No, I'm not talking about on their Fitbits or their Stairmasters. I'm talking about the continual progression of steps towards full gun control…also known as total citizen disarmament.

Now, if you don't believe this is where they are headed, I have an experiment for you. Go find your favorite gun control advocate, pick any proposed gun control measure, and ask them if they think that will suffice to get criminal gun violence to an acceptable level. But for those of you who don't want to wait, or believe you don't know a gun control advocate (I bet you do), I can go ahead and tell you what they're going to say…

[SPOILER ALERT]…The answer they are most likely to give will be along these lines: “Well, it's a good first step.”

“First step"?! Of course, some folks are innocently clueless, and really don't understand that the gun control movement has been taking steps for decades. But the others…the true ideologues and the pros…they know that their “good first step” is nothing of the sort. Not only is it not the first step, it won’t be the last, either.

Let's look at a current “good first step" gun control bill making its way through Congress…H.R. 8. This bill is being labeled as a universal background check bill, which will require that almost all private transfers of firearms go through a background check at a licensed firearms dealer. There is a flaw in the bill, however, and it isn't an accident. As written, with current federal gun laws being what they are, the law will be essentially unenforceable…and thus useless. After all, how can law enforcement know if someone transferred a firearm if they don't know who owned it in the first place? Without a central gun registry…a list of who owns what guns…how can you know if any of them have changed hands illegally?

You can’t track gun transfers if you don’t know where they all are.

And there's your step. The lack of a national gun registry will render this law toothless, but that's no accident. This built-in flaw will soon give them the evidence they feel they need to claim that more must be done. Remember that this was only a “good first step,” and they will next exclaim that more legislation is required to close the “loophole" in the original law. Just one more step…

Interestingly, this law is being proposed to close the “gun show loophole,” which is an intentionally misleading way to say “perfectly legal private transfer.” Private transfers of firearms is not a loophole, it's in the law. It's in laws that were deliberately written and passed by a previous Congresses. And now the current Congress is working on passing a law to fix something they don't like about the earlier one, known to them as a “loophole.”

This is how gun control progresses. Every gun control law passed is eventually criticized as being inadequate, needing yet another “good first step” law to fix it. And unless we take steps of our own, the final step may well look like this…