I just can't believe how much they stick on the "assault weapons" and magazine issue. It's dumbfounding. Maybe if they joined forces with us to demand resources are moved from drug trafficking to arms trafficking, as well as ask prosecutors and AGs why they aren't doing shit, they could make a difference.
The harsh reality is this: They only care about rich white kids. Fact. Period. End of discussion.
They don't even care about that, actually, the only thing they care about is disarming people. Sure the groups have useful idiots at the bottom that march around with signs braying about reducing "gun violence" and all that crap, but that's just bread and circus type tripe that acts as fuel for their real agenda. They use it as a means of buying votes from uninformed people who are generically scared of guns. The architects of these groups, the people actually running things, their only goal is to ban and/or severely restrict gun ownership. The "Assault Weapons" and "Magazine" stuff is just a form of big time incrementalism- the idea is if you ban those things, it deters ownership. I know this for a fact because before I got licensed I was almost one of those people who saw the laws and almost threw my hands up in the air about to say "Why even bother, they've already banned everything already that doesn't suck." Thankfully I looked past that, others might not, however. The "kids are getting shot" stuff is just a bullshit excuse, the reality is they are afraid of guns and are content to have the state "take care" of them. After years of watching these orgs and what they do, this has become abundantly clear to me. Over the years I read a bunch of different articles about street violence, and you find two distinct camps, although one of them is barely recognized because it doesn't expand state power and doesn't focus on banning guns. For example you'd read more than one article about some kid getting killed. In one chunk you hear a local pastor getting interviewed and he wouldn't say ONE THING about "banning guns" or "getting guns of the streets" or any of that crap, he'd make comments focused on trying to keep kids out of trouble to begin with, which is a huge part of the problem in inner cities. The tool used in the violence is irrelevant to people who actually want to solve the problems. In another article all you hear is some pol playing lip service to gun control and ignoring the real elephants in the room.... gun control is the "easy way out " politically, because they get to dodge the fact that the government and society has failed on numerous fronts when they push it. Guns and gun ownership are used a the default, go-to scapegoats for epic failures in other parts of our existence as a nation and a society. Thankfully I think that this trick is starting to fail more and more often- lots of people aren't buying into it anymore- due in large part to the fact that we've experienced a huge surge in non-fudd gun ownership in this country in the past decade.
The proof is also in the pudding- Look at what happened to Americans For Gun Safety- a moderate anti group that, while would be considered offensive to us, was far more moderate than MAIG, etc, in terms of where they focused their energy; they were far more purpose driven- yet AGS got virtually no traction and no support and died off, and the virulent groups got the support by the hoplophobes. AGS didn't have "banning guns and reducing ownership" as a core value so the antis didn't support it.
These groups are not interested in "stopping street violence" with firearms or otherwise. All they want to do is make the state more powerful and strip people of their guns. Look at what those douchebags in Burlington, VT, are trying to do.. VT has so little street violence its statistically lost in the noise, yet the antis there are running around in circles trying to ban things just because they can- because they're afraid of guns, and also afraid of the curse of the individual- which is the whole
****ing point of being an american.
I apologize for the length of my post but I guess what I'm getting at here, is don't be fooled. There is no meeting in the middle with these people.
-Mike