What they don’t see is what they get

by David Benjamin

“… laws are being shoved through Congress that specifically restrict certain firearms, armor, ammo and the like. The Obama administration made it clear that their agenda was to disarm patriots, just like Hitler, Stalin, [Pol] Pot and Mao did. We are headed for disaster…”

—Lisa Haven, The Millennium Report (dated Feb. 2018)

MADISON, Wis.— Alex Jones, the InfoWars prince of propaganda, is being sentenced this week for lying relentlessly that the massacre of twenty tots and six teachers at the Sandy Hook School ten years ago was a “false flag” operation. Jones convinced thousands of listeners that the government staged the bloodbath as pretext for a national confiscation of guns, rifles, explosives and other ordnance from ordinary family-defending American patriots like you, me and Alex Jones. 

It’s gospel among Second Amendment paranoids that Democratic politicians are hellbent on snatching guns from every citizen on the face of the continent, so that they can crush us all under the hobnailed boot of Marxist tyranny while dusky criminals run amok, rifling our jewels and ravaging our women. 

Lately, the danger foreseen by gun cultists is a slope toward Armageddon made treacherously slippery by “red flag” measures in the U.S. Congress and various states. Rep. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), rang a typical tocsin on Tucker Carlson’s show: “Red-flag laws are a green light for gun confiscation… These people are going to weaponize red-flag laws to punish their political opponents.”

A few years ago, I got curious about gun confiscation and undertook a Web search for a) laws proposed by Democrats or liberals ordering the forcible seizure of some or all legally owned guns, and b) statements by Democrats advocating that guns be taken away from “law-abiding” citizens. I came up empty.

I tried again today, taking note that Google lists four million entries for “gun confiscation laws.” I could find no citation of any Democratic lawmaker or Democratic-controlled body seeking to intrude—broadly and generally—upon private citizens in their homes to take away their legally obtained firearms.

None.

Yes, red-flag laws take away guns. But this isn’t the sort of mass confiscation practiced by the tyrants inevitably cited by gun cultists like Rep. Schmitt. 

Second Amendment extremists did, however, perk up three years ago shortly after Patrick Wood Crusius, 21, strolled into an El Paso Walmart with his trusty AK-47 and strafed 46 people, killing half of them. This carnage prompted Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.)—who was running for president—to blurt out that, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

There, finally, the NRA and its minions had proof that liberals want to confiscate guns. Well, a specific type of gun, but yeah. Confiscate!

No Democrat before Beto had ever mentioned seizing guns, nor have any brought it up since. The flaw in the right-wing’s dark augury of gun plunder was inadvertently exposed in January in a blog by Joe Drammissi of the San Diego County Gun Owners. “Gun confiscation has been the holy grail of the gun-control community for decades,” wrote Drammissi. “It wasn’t until recently, the 2020 primaries, that it was openly admitted (remember Beto?) by Democrat politicians.”

You see the problem here. Joe’s facile “holy grail” metaphor evokes the religious wars of the Middle Ages, when thousands of “knights,” egged on by the Vatican, invaded the Middle East questing to wrest the mythical cup of Jesus from the infidel Muslims. The Crusades failed. More important, for the sake of the metaphor, they were obvious. Everybody knew. Fortunes were squandered. Thousands died. Regimes crumbled. The pursuit of the holy grail was about as public as an event can get. It went on, fecklessly, for two hundred years.

By contrast, according to Drammissi, Beto O’Rourke was the first Democrat—in more than a century of rampant American gun violence—to reveal an ideological lust for gun seizures. How, despite the curiosity of a voracious press, in the viral world of social media, has the “gun-control community” kept secret for decades its holy-grail crusade to snatch away every gun from every innocent target shooter and squirrel-plunker in America?

There is, actually, an answer. It is the linchpin of every conspiracy theory. The most diabolical schemes ever plotted—insist conspiracists—are brilliantly concealed. They’re invisible. The absence of evidence that these devious and secret designs exist is the absolute evidence of their existence. 

What the conspiracists don’t see is what they—and only they—get.

Per this theory, the Democrats want your guns. We know this, for sure, because the Democrats will never, ever say they want your guns and they will never do anything overt to take away your guns.

Until, one morning, poof! Your guns have been taken. By whom? Who knows? When? Who knows? How? Who knows? Why? Well, you know. 

But be afraid. Be very afraid. 

I hesitate to suggest that no one ever took away guys’ guns in America. According to Matt Jancer in the Smithsonian and various historians, prohibiting six-shooters was common—and popular—in the old West. Any Western movie buff knows that Wyatt Earp (actually, his brother Virgil) enforced a rigid gun ban in Tombstone. Sanctions for violation were severe. As gun-ban scofflaws Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton found out too late, you could get killed. 

Before the shootout at the OK Corral, the Earp brothers were similarly empowered in Dodge City. When that town formed a municipal government in 1878, the first law passed was to forbid the carry of guns in town.

Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA and a maven of the “Wild West,” explained. “Having a firearm to protect yourself in the lawless wilderness from wild animals, hostile native tribes and outlaws was a wise idea. But when you came into town, you had to… check your guns…”

In those days, townspeople had few objections to the disarming of drunken cowboys and angry teenagers like Billy Clanton. Winkler said, “I’ve never seen any rhetoric from that time period saying that the only thing that’s going to reduce violence is more people with guns. It seems to be much more of a 20th-century attitude than one associated with the Wild West.”

Luckily for us, history offers a clue to resolving the paradox between gun-control common sense in the 19th century and gun-rights hysteria in the 21st. In 1865, just as the Civil War ended and four million slaves were set loose among the pale patricians of Mississippi, South Carolina and the greater Confederacy, white legislatures throughout the South, passed “black codes,” which, significantly, prohibited black persons from possessing firearms.

If we have any hope of enacting such simple gun-safety measures as red flag laws, fingerprint gun locks and assault-weapon bans, we need to pull a switcheroo on 1865. Rather than taking guns away from blacks, we should hand them out. Specifically, we issue an official government AK-47 or AR-15, with 1,000 rounds of hollow-point ammo, to every black male in America 13 years of age and older.

All the NRA’s beloved gun-mongers—Ruger, Sig-Sauer, Daniel Defense, etc.—would be nipple-deep in Uncle Sam’s beneficence and shouting “Hosannah!” 

And suddenly, in counterpoint, across the land from sea to wine-dark sea could be heard the voice of the “color-blind” Republican crying, “Gun control, gun control, before it’s too late: Gun control!”