Gun control is a big lobbying beast of anti-civil rights advocates, lobby groups, billionaires, and folks who don’t have your best interests at heart. They’ve used a variety of tactics throughout the years, and today we are going to discuss those tactics because we need to know them to counter them.
Gun Control Tactics to Watch For
The Economic Squeeze
One of the earliest gun control tactics that exists to this day was to price the average person out of firearms ownership. These laws would target specific guns and features, effectively banning them. One of the earliest examples was the Army and Navy Laws of the 1800s.
Tennessee was the first to enact such laws. In 1879, they passed the Act to Prevent Sale of Pistols. In a post-Civil War world, they aimed to prevent newly freed slaves from being armed. This law banned the sale or importation of handguns outside of Army or Navy Models.
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This meant the only handguns you could buy were expensive, effectively banning anyone below certain income levels from purchasing firearms. These types of laws have continued to be enacted in various ways. The 1968 Gun Control Act added a points system to restrict the importation of handguns that didn’t meet a sporting purpose.
This was done primarily to stop the importation of cheap handguns like the Rohm Revolvers. Various states would adopt ‘melting’ point laws. These would ban the sale of firearms made of metals like Zamak. These melting point bans would actively prohibit the sale of cheaper firearms.
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Good Moral Character Discretion
Another popular method used by gun control activists is the good moral character clause. New York’s Sullivan Act of 1911 is the best example of this method. What occurs is that the state gives a government office, traditionally the police, the discretion to prevent a person from buying or carrying a gun.
They had unchecked power to deny people their 2nd Amendment rights by simply saying they didn’t believe they had good moral character. This was not a background check and was not something that had to involve an applicant’s criminal background or lack thereof.
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It was an unchecked power. If the granting agency didn’t like your race, your politics, your neighborhood, or the way you smiled, it would claim that you didn’t possess good moral character. The Sullivan Act politicized rights and was typically used to deny Irish and Italian immigrants the right to own and carry firearms.
We still see this in states with may-issue concealed carry and pistol permits. It’s an age-old means to restrict gun ownership that continues to this day.
Tax It
The National Firearms Act was one of the most relevant pieces of gun control nonsense ever passed. The politicians at the time were clever and knew an outright ban on machine guns, silencers, SBRs, SBSs, AOWs, etc. would not stand up to Constitutional scrutiny.
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So they taxed it. You can still own it, as long as you pay the $200 tax stamp. In the 1930s, that was about $4,500 dollars. It’s an absurdly high price, but inflation has made the stamp less of a barrier.
The NFA is the most obvious tax for gun owners. However, gun manufacturers face their own excise taxes on firearms and ammunition, which only raises the price for the end user. California and Colorado also add an additional tax on firearm sales.
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Technology Mandates
I’d say this was new, but it’s arguably not. Melting point laws could arguably be a technological mandate. California leads the nation with technological mandates via its handgun roster. They have an approved roster, and getting added to that roster is exceptionally difficult.
Namely, because to get a new gun on that list, you need to integrate microstamping technology. This would stamp a serial number on the case or primer of a round fired, allowing it to be tracked back to a specific gun. The thing is, that technology doesn’t even exist.
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New Jersey had the famed smart gun law. This law stated that three years after a marketable smart gun was created, all guns sold in NJ would have to feature smart gun technology. Luckily, that backfired spectacularly.
Just Lie
The most popular tactic of the gun control industry is just to lie. Just make stuff up. The assault weapon bans across the United States are all relying on the lie that specific features, like a bayonet lug or flash hider, make a gun more dangerous.
More modern lies include gun control groups listing hundreds of ‘school’ shootings that take place each year. When you dive into their numbers, you find that they include things like negligent discharges by police officers as school shootings, or a suicide across the street, and basically any other way they can pad those numbers.
Another one is the claim that guns are the leading cause of death for children. Once you dissect the report, you quickly figure out it’s also a lie. The way they got their number was to eliminate an age group of children and to add 18- and 19-year-old adults. When you adjust the numbers to children aged 0 to 17, the leading cause of death is no longer guns.
Gun Control Tactics
You have to know the enemy, know their tactics, and know how they work. We can’t beat them unless we can counter their tactics. We need to be aware of their tactics and never give them a single inch.