​Should SHOTShow move from Las Vegas due to predicted anti-gun legislation that would outlaw (for Nevadans) many of the products being sold at the show? All possibilities for gun control are on the table in Nevada’s 2019 legislative session, including assault weapon bans. Holding SHOT in Las Vegas in 2020 and beyond may be like holding it California.
 
Legalities aside, does the National Sports Shooting Foundation (NSSF) have a moral duty to move the show to a state that does not wholesale infringe on the right to keep and bear arms?
 
Yes, it does. The firearms industry stays in business and does so well precisely because of the American tradition of gun ownership. This is a citizen consumer oriented convention intended to help manufacturers sells guns to retailer who will sell guns and gun stuff to people like you and I. This is not a arms expo showing off the latest anti-aircraft missile to third world generals. If Americans cannot purchase the products being shown freely, the show is pointless.
 
The total abolition of American citizen firearm ownership is almost certainly in the works and it’s time for the big boys to stand up and be heard. Large manufactures and the NSSF need to take a political stance to stop (or at least delay) totalitarian gun control or else all but the biggest houses with military business will find themselves legislated into the unemployment lines. The days of paying lobbyists to threaten legislators with re-election heartache is out. Traditional means of influencing politicians is quickly becoming ineffective.
 
In order to effect change, the frankly corrupt (either actually or morally) politicians have to be hit where it counts; in their pocketbook. In the case of Nevada, this means hurting the gambling gaming industry so they turn the screws on their bought-off politicians. It means causing pain to the casino unions because their union members are being laid off. We must take away money from those who can influence politicians so that they in turn demand the clowns in Carson City stop, or don’t do, stupid things.
 
Hank Strange’s podcast had an interesting discussion on this topic. It’s worth a listen. In response to some of their concerns, I don’t believe that Nevada law enforcement would ever enforce a Nevada assault weapons ban, etc. on SHOTShow. Why? Because Nevada is corrupt. Large conventions means lots of money to the casinos. I’m sure there would be a legislative exception or California-esque “dangerous weapon permit” to allow the show to go on. Even if not, you can guarantee no one from Metro or the state will do anything to harm a massive money-making convention for Nevada’s only real industry.
 
My request is that NSSF schedule the next feasible SHOTShow for another state like Texas that isn’t ready to capitulate to tyranny. It may not be for a few years, due to scheduling and contracts, but it would send a message to Gov. Sleekstak and his merry band of idiots. If you work for NSSF or deal closely with them, please encourage them to go elsewhere. I don’t have high hopes because everyone wants a free trip to Vegas.

​On December 17, 2018 in Madison, WI, an man openly carrying had a handgun snatched from his holster and managed to avoid being shot. In the words of noted pithy Madison Police public information officer Joel DeSpain:
 
"The victim said he and a buddy were just 'hanging out.' His friend was not armed, but he was. In fact, he was carrying two handguns, a long gun, and a machete type knife in a sheath this past Monday night.
 
"His friend would later tell police that the victim – a gun advocate – was wanting to make a statement about the right to bear arms, and had been on busy State St. a couple of times practicing 'open carry.' The friend also admitted another goal – for both of them - was to 'get girls' (phone) numbers.'
 
"The MPD had gotten calls from people regarding an armed man, walking State Street, but he was breaking no laws, and was not contacted. That was until he, himself, called 911.
 
"Another man, who has no permanent home, and is known to downtown patrol officers, had confronted the victim saying something similar to: 'Why you wanna kill people.' The gunman responded saying he was armed because it was his right, and it was for protection.
 
"It was around this time that the suspect closed distance between he and the victim. He grabbed and yanked a holstered handgun from the victim's body. The suspect pointed the loaded weapon at the victim, and the victim – in turn – pulled his long gun and pointed it at the suspect. It was a fluid, tense and quick standoff.
 
"It ended with the suspect running off, still in possession of the victim's handgun. Officers would later locate him. They recovered the stolen handgun and took the suspect into custody on a number of tentative charges."
 
The suspect, Melvin F. Bogus, age 39, a transient, was arrested for second degree reckless endangerment, theft, possession of firearm by felon, possession of cocaine and bail jumping.
 
Like the young man in Oregon who was showing off his new handgun, it’s obvious from his own words that this Madison open carrier was not your average person carrying for everyday self-defense. He had a rifle and large knife with him. Part of his stated intention was to “get girls numbers.” He was showing off—not making any serious political statement about the Second Amendment nor carrying for practical defense. This open carrier was behaving stupidly.
 
The details of the snatch and whether or not the holster was retention holster are unknown. Though the two did struggle over the handgun, indicating the open carrier did have some presence of mind to protect his handgun, carrying a rifle likely interfered with his ability to retain his pistol. At least he had his long-gun to point at the suspect, though it’s unclear whether or not the Mr. Bogus actually intended to harm his victim.
 
This incident is not evidence that open carry is ill-advised or that one is likely to be similarly victimized. Rather, this is an example of a foolish person who was not serious about his purpose and certainly not engaged in everyday defensive carry. It was a political/attention-getting stunt that backfired spectacularly. Several of the admitted factors by the victim indicate that this was very likely an amateur targeted by a slightly deranged Bogus who saw the imprudent open carrier as an easy mark. Had the open carrier not made open carry into a spectacle, this incident almost certainly would not have happened. Bogus’ remark implies the image the open carrier projected was not that of a situationally aware defensive carrier, but instead was threatening or stupid.
 
A person who open carriers a handgun in a secure holster for self-defense—rather than parading in public to flaunt his guns and woo the ladies—will more than likely not find himself in this situation. The carrier’s ability to retain control over his handgun and push away Bogus was likely inhibited by holding the long-gun (or at least keeping it out of the way during the struggle). However, the presence of that long-gun may have kept this from escalating. 

Sorry concealed carry supremacists; this is not a 'win' for arguing open carry is dangerous. Being stupid is dangerous.

The long-standing dispute with the Las Vegas Clark County Library District (LVCCLD) has been settled Flores v. LVCCLD. I’m not going to dissect the opinion piece by piece. I might later, but to do so is moot at this point.
 
The short version is that for years, LVCCLD has ignored state law that only prohibits concealed carry in public buildings, when posted. Open carry is legal in public buildings per NRS 202.3673, except local districts—like library districts—that have rules against it (according to the Flores decision).
 
What the court decided, was that because local districts are not specifically mentioned in each of the sections pertaining to counties, cities, and towns, that the legislature really didn’t intend to limit the ability of the odd local district, like library districts, to ban legal open carry. The court found the right hoops to jump through to make shit stick to the wall, but hey, no one ever said that lawyers were honest or decent human beings.
 
Obviously, this is wrong and the dissent points this out. The other wording of the bill (and the resulting NRS section) clearly indicates that firearm regulation is reserved only to the legislature, not a board of unelected, hand-picked cronies. Justice Cherry calls out the other “justices” for basically ignoring clear legislative intent. The dissent also notes the plethora of case law from other states affirming preemption and that the odd government entity does not have special powers. 

Unfortunately, the legislature did not listen to advice to include such districts or more expansive language to avoid this kind of situation. In a sage world, where “justices” dispensed justice and followed the example of case law elsewhere, the prefatory sections reserving power to the legislature and the clear legislative intent would have made all this moot.
 
Yet much of the Nevada government is corrupt and likes to play an insider’s game. I charge that the Nevada Supreme Court made a biased decision, deliberately ignoring the facts, in order to execute a political objective—the exact thing an independent judiciary is supposed to avoid. I’d bet, with no proof whatsoever, that anti-gun elements got to the justices and convinced them to vote against the law and logic.
 
Furthermore, the justices have been aware since the 1990s that open carry is perfectly legal in their courthouse. That’s right; only by fiat did the Supreme Court ban open carry in its building. However, if the issue was forced, they’d apply their flawed Flores logic and say they could.
 
Going forward from here, no realistic path exists at the state level. The governorship and the legislature has gone blue and it’s not likely to switch back. There will be no correction to preemption when we have legislators and Gov. Sleestak (Sisolak) looking to abolish preemption altogether. Sleestak wanted ban bump-fire stocks in Las Vegas to virtue signal after the Mandalay Bay-Route 91 Harvest-October 1 mass shooting.
 
Sleestak is the same man who was actually reasonable on firearms until the Democratic Party dragged everyone who wanted to stay in the party to their hoplopathic narrative. That’s right, Governor-elect Sleestak was perfectly fine with preemption in the 1990s. What changed? Party funding; be anti-gun and become anti-American or the Democratic Party won’t pay your election bills anymore.
 
Federally, we are still in the Ninth Circus, so expecting those justices to save us is unlikely. As for the Supreme Court, their extreme reluctance to take pro-gun cases (likely fearing a devastating swing vote) limits options federally. Justice Scalia’s “sensitive areas” language in the opinion of Heller also problematic. “Sensitive places” today are based on the flawed logic of disarming the law abiding actually protects people.
 
The only places where people should be disarmed are places where there is a real threat that a concealed carrier (etc.) might abuse the privilege to deceive in order to commit violence. An example of this would be a courthouse, where a defendant or spouse at a hearing uses the law to carry past security and kill the judge, witnesses, etc. Of course, courthouses generally have decent security, including screening, and armed officers to respond to threats. Utah sets a good example where lockboxes are required at the entrances.
 
We put up a good fight against a contemptible foe. Mrs. Flores bravely stood up against bureaucrats and assholes, I mean trustees, and fought the good fight; something she should be well congratulated for. Getting a favorable opinion by “cheating” is not victory and cheating is something that LVCCLD has done at every turn. Leftists love to cheat and tell you what’s best for you. We’re going to see more of that at the state and national level from here on out. But we know a storm is coming and those that abuse the rights of men, dishonor the law, and behave like tyrants will reap the whirlwind.
 
And please, no one do anything stupid or inflammatory until after the legislature adjourns in June.

No, 2019 and the Democratic control of the Nevada state government will not bring with it a reprise of Clark County’s handgun registration. What it is guaranteed is that the statehouse will be chock full of stupid and tears will wet the cheeks Kit Carson’s statue. Bad gun bills will be legion. Let’s be realistic about what we’re facing.
 
Handgun registration is not coming back to Eastern California Clark County. The blue card program was not very useful and not-well-liked by the public. Reinstating it would result in near non-compliance and would be far too expensive for Metro to bother with. The danger though is in the host of other laws that were finally killed off in 2015, such as the three-day wait (unless you had a blue card already).
 
Repealing or modifying state preemption of local guns laws, which has been in on the books since 1989, would cause problems. Little ones would be reinstating waiting periods as above. San Francisco on the Truckee might to try it’s hands at a Boulder, Colorado, style “assault weapon” “certification” program while North Las Vegas gets to put it’s “loitering while armed” laws back on the books to harass people for no good reason.
 
Locally, we would have to watch for hoplopathic petty tyrants trying to virtue signal via the municipal code, locally passing all sorts of garbage they couldn’t get through in Carson City. On the other hand, conservative counties like Nye and Douglas would probably pass a “Second Amendment protection” ordinance to locally nullify the Sleestak’s gun control.
 
Nationally, the hot topics have been “universal background checks” and “red flag laws.” “Universal background checks” is just code for banning private gun sales to set the state for sale/transfer based registration (for Californians, think DROS). Red flag laws, also known as gun violence restraining orders, are basically court orders that allow the police to confiscate guns from people reported as potentially homicidal or suicidal. We’ll get both.
 
First, background checks will by one form of chicanery or the other will pass, but will quickly get tied up in court, leaving us pretty much where we are now. Second, with precious few Republicans in the legislature and probably none of them wanting to get skewered when the next Bad Thing With a Gun occurs, red flag laws will pass. It seems reasonable, and maybe if America was still sane it would be. The slippery slope is a poor defense for vulnerable politicians. 

A stronger "safe storage" law will be passed in the wake of CCSD's inability to deal with it's gang and thug problem. Currently, Nevada law punishes anyone allowing a minor access to a firearm if something bad happens, such as the kid brings the gun to school or shoots someone. So to curb this evil, they'll likely require all handguns to be locked away and/or unloaded while not in use. Once again, the magic of legislation will somehow get people who have never heard of this new law to store their guns safely.

​As far as magazine bans, assault weapon bans, 18-20 year old being disenfranchised from gun ownership, etc. we’ll see it all and it’s anyone’s guess what’ll make off Sleestak’s desk. Our best guide for what might happen is to look at other states.
 
Colorado and Oregon are good guides. Colorado is an example for non-compliance; they passed a bunch of laws, but they are basically ignored or evaded with ease and little consequence. Oregon is a good example, as like Nevada, it is lead by basically one major Democratic-voting city, and shows just how rapidly and tyranny-leaning legislation can move. I refrain from comparing us to Washington because we have at least another election and further demographic change to go before all hope is lost.
 
Now all things are possible with Democrats and Jesus, except Jesus only promises to make your guns unnecessary, not illegal. We’re not quite as bad as the People’s Republic to our west. All that depends on the next election. The Democrats control of the legislature is tied entirely to how stupid they want to be this year. If they want to go full retard and ban everything, along with more taxes, charging for plastic grocery bags, and flogging waiters for handing out straws, well more power to them.
 
I welcome Democrats fulfilling every statist, socialist fantasy that they’ve been waiting for this chance to inflict upon us. By all means, please waste your political capitol banning the guns of the most independent state in the Union. Hell, think of all the good we could do if we paid an income tax! Seriously now, going full retard on guns and other stuff leftists want to do will piss off moderates and energize at least a handful of competitive districts in 2020. That’ll mean in the next legislative session, there will be gridlock, or at least enough resistance to slow the vote to unite Nevada with California. If Sleestak is as smart as he is corrupt, he’ll realize that going all-out will make Nevada purple again.
 
As the Nevada Firearms Coalition’s PAC priorities state, priority one is to keep what we’ve gained thus far. Priority two is to buy time; time to finish buying guns and ammo, beans, bullets, and Band-Aids. A civil war is coming along with a bad economic downturn and the future is not a bright one. We need to buy as much time as possible. Campus/constitutional carry aren’t going to happen this year, so if you post that bright suggestion online you’re either a troll or new to the party.
 
On a bright note, one thing I realized here when I moved from California was that I am a free citizen. Once you understand that you are free all the other crap doesn’t seem so bad. Plus when it gets really bad, we all know what the Second Amendment is really about.
 
I know there is going to be lot of questions on this-or-that, but stay tuned as I’ll eventually address as many concerns as possible. Also, I’m not writing about everything I’m thinking because evil assholes read this blog. If you want to go down the what if rabbit hole with me, show up to the next NVFAC meetup or we’ll schedule a group down south. 

From the Land of the Lost wiki fan site:

Sounds a lot like the Democratic Party and their lizard-people overlords.

The Clark County School District has a problem with students bringing guns to school; not just gang members and troubled teens, but little kids too. Last time CCSD got their panties in this much of a bunch over guns on campus (it was adult gang members then), they got the legislature to ban guns on campus. Ah, the 1980s.

This time, they actually proposed something halfway intelligent, as the Review-Journal​ reports.

Let's watch how they totally screw this up. I mean, this is the "we'll grope your kids for guns, but we won't molest them," school district. 

It'll be interesting to see if they teach little kids "stop, don't touch, run away, tell an adult." And may something more like traditional gun safety to the older kids? I'm sure there is a class that teaches them how to put on condoms or do stuff in the bedroom safely, so why can't we teach the 8-14 year olds how not to shoot each other if they find Dad's gun?

Legislatively, I'd be that the mildest of bill draft requests filed includes a mandatory safe storage law, rather than Nevada's current law that punishes negligent storage. Encouraging safe storage by punishing the screw-ups doesn't offend personal liberty, but does accomplish the public safety objective. Unfortunately, unsafe storage charges are pretty rare. 

The next American civil war will not break out over gun confiscation. As much as I myself love firearms and enjoy the freedom we have for now, I myself am not willing to die for the right to own firearms. Rather, what I am willing to fight for is other freedoms, so eloquently put by Thomas Jefferson as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well the safety of my family. When those most basic elements of individual humanity are marked for destruction by the government, then I will use the right-of-last-resort to fight for what’s mine.
 
The sacrosanct right Mr. Jefferson also articulated, that of rebellion against tyranny, dovetails perfectly the with the purpose of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not about hunting; it is about killing totalitarian politicians and the police/soldiers they send to enforce their tyrannical edicts. In the 18th century, it was shooting at the British Army, but today it is assassinating politicians, bureaucrats, and party flunkies as much as it is resisting by force of arms police/military snatch squads and search teams.
 
Blowing away politicians, even the ones you hate the most, is not a good thing. For one thing, it will encourage whoever the “other side” is to do the same thing or begin other deprivations in retaliation. Government will certainly enact strict measures to control the situation or punish the rebels as soon as some legislator or congress-critter gets sniped from the woods. If you think being disarmed because the cop knows you have a CCW is bad, imagine being subjected to a totally unwarranted search because the cop knows you own guns.
 
Second, a world where peaceful politics doesn’t work is not the kind of world we live in. For most of us, we quietly acquiesce to things like long red lights on lonely streets late at night because out of respect for the law than the fear of a crash or traffic cop. That kind of order is preferable to most of us than the chaos of an uncontrolled intersection in India. Similarly, none of us want to live in a banana republic where if the mayor gets to wild and free with, say bike lanes, the car dealers whack half the city council.
 
I doubt many people here care if a few politicians get it between the ears. Political assassination on a scale larger than the act of a random, disturbed weirdo always results in blowback. Widespread political violence always results in other savagery. Northern Ireland, Sarajevo, and Rwanda are good examples were there is no fine line between political violence and interpersonal religious/sectarian violence. If a crazy liberal kills President Trump and conservatives retaliate, Antifa hits the streets while the right-wing militias follow behind.
 
Radical gun control initiatives, the kind that make Michael Bloomberg cream his sheets at night, almost always follow on the heels of a tragedy of some sort. Take 2013 and the Sandy Hook massacre for instance, or California’s 1989 Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act after a dumb creep shot up a schoolyard. Political assassinations would be the perfect ammunition for nearly any Congress, even weak-needed Republicans, to roll gun ownership back to what some Fudd in Pennsylvania would approve of.
 
After the Scalise-Republican congressional baseball assassination attempt, neither violence nor gun control went anywhere because Republicans knew it was a lone nutjob and the rest of leftist America wasn’t ready to do that kind of thing. Give the non-crazy leftists motivation like whoops, Trump won again or something and the slow media-fueled radicalization will give some hope-deprived or otherwise emboldened leftist reason to be successful next time. It could stampede minority Republic-cucks into caving on gun control as well, but what is certain is that in near future, political violence will be seen by a non-insignificant number as appropriate.
 
Now let’s talk a little about scenarios and timing. In 2020, no matter who wins the presidential election, it will be contested and half the country will not accept the president and possibly not even Congress. This happened in 1860 with the election of Lincoln. At some point, someone will get stupid over something and create the catalyst mentioned one paragraph above. With America’s faith in democracy finally totally shattered, political violence will be increasingly looked to, first as a way to vent frustration and weaken one’s enemies, then as a means to control the direction of society and government.
 
Government will still exist, even if executives and legislators are getting nothing done other than the finger from their constituents. Police and regulatory agencies will still function fairly normally and so will the IRS. It’s not an anarchists dystopia yet. At this point, it will be clear that there is no voting our way back to normal; only through increasing violence can one side exert political control.
 
During all this, the economy is faltering. People are being evicted and doing everything from committing crimes to feed their families to shooting up loan offices after a foreclosure. While political violence is going on, the financial markets will inevitably crash again, correcting the horrible mistakes of pre-2008 that merely ignored the roots of the problem. At some point, we will see riots over empty EBT cards, no welfare or social security checks, and a host of other issues. No one is going to want to work or deliver goods into a riot zone.
 
As I said before, almost no one is going to throw their life away merely over guns. Even with harsh restrictions, we bury them, we build homemade machine guns in our garages, and carry even if it’s now illegal. We do what we have to in order to survive. It is not until we face an existential threat, such as many Jews faced when the SS and Gestapo came knocking, that violence is worth the risk. As many of us believe, it is better to die fighting than to live as a slave. Only when one looses everything is it acceptable for the rational man to rebel.
 
As Mr. Jefferson said, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” We are far more willing to try and make the best of things than resort to the total upheaval and gamble that is insurrection. But desperate men will turn to desperate measures. Again, for the reasonable man, that is simple self-preservation and self-discipline in practice because he knows that seldom does anything good come violence.
 
Nonetheless, violence is sometimes necessary for survival, even if it is to survive the crushing weight of a dark, authoritarian future. Not seeing 1984 become reality is worth dying for, but even so, it is the timing of when to fight that is crucial. Once again, Jefferson says “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” one is permitted to rebel. 

In the 1770s, America began to resist when Parliament and King George made life extremely difficult and expensive for the colonists. The Declaration of Independence lists these abuses. Though far from being forced to the brink of survival, colonists were essentially denied all the protections of being an English subject, leaving them in a bureaucratic nightmare of taxes, fees, and permission. The bar for rebellion then was much lower than today because many of Congress’ complaints are perpetrated on Americans today.
 
Now as some have been saying to themselves since the first paragraph, the war of American revolution began in 1775 as the British Army marched to confiscate stores of gunpowder and weaponry from the Massachusetts militia. The British had gone too far because they knew if the troops were taking away the guns, then with Parliament deaf to their cries, there would be nothing left to stop far worse crimes by the Crown. With no militia to stop them, General Gage could have rounded up John and Sam Adams and other influential patriots, destroying the nascent Continental Congress.
 
So though the Revolution began over a gun confiscation raid, it did not begin for that reason. Likewise, we fought the Civil War over slavery (not to free the slaves), but a host of other reasons like agrarian vs. industrial economies and Southern pride combined and compounded to lead to war. In the 21st century the civil war will be over existential issues; the attack on the traditional American way of life, a rejection of socialism, the invasion of the Third World, and survival in a regulatory and economically depressed nightmare.
 
The actual catalytic event is unknown, it could be a gun confiscation thing. All I’m saying is that no one is turning out for battle when Assault Weapons Ban 2.0 is passed. One blogger remarked that the Left has a variety of actions in regards to political violence; a “knob” that ranges from protests to riots and murder. For those on the right, we are disposed to suffer, calling the Right’s responses a “switch” with two settings: “vote and Shoot Fucking Everybody” [emphasis added]. You get the point. Conservatives don’t throw public temper tantrums or do stupid shit unless we have lost or are on the brink of losing everything.
 
In 1775, Massachusetts was on the brink of losing everything in the sense of political reform. In other times and places, the people had lost all political power and had everything, in a metaphorical sense, taken from them after years of tyranny. In both cases, there wasn’t much more to lose and everything to gain. In December of 2018, running out and playing revolutionary will only get you killed/jailed and if it goes national, will cost the rest of us the remaining few comfortable years we have left.
 
I don’t know about you, but I want to enjoy the time I have with my family. I have vacations to take, places to see, things to do, and stuff I want to buy. Few of us are ready to stand guard over our meagre backyard garden on a cold, wet night because the starving neighbors are going to come over the fence. A dangerous, hungry future is what civil war and the coming turmoil will bring. The natural course of events will lead us to war without anyone’s help.
 
As I said before, the political world will go haywire. We might even be at war with Russia or China. The economy will crash before or as a result of all of this. Political violence will lead to Left/Right and racial warfare full of shootings, bombings, and no-go zones like Northern Ireland. Many of us will live in a police state. During all of this, the reasonable and prudent man will choose to suffer as long as his family is safe, fed, and his guns tucked under the stairs are still there.
 
Conservatives do not engage in political violence until they have everything, or nothing left, to lose. As demoralizing as it is to watch our rights, freedoms, and way of live disintegrate, I’d rather live in a liberal California on steroids than live in something closer to The Walking Dead. I have a duty to protect my family and that duty does not involve starting today’s Bleeding Kansas for my own self-satisfaction. The majority of us “woke” gun-toting, liberty-minded folks will also bide their time.
 
If you don’t know now, you will come next election, but there is no voting our way out of this. The tax and regulatory burden will increase, the economy will tank, the government will hate you more, and crime will go up, all while some invader from the Third World takes a figurative or literal dump on your lawn. Then it just keeps getting worse as you’re struggling to make it day to day, financially, physically, and mentally. No hope is on the horizon.
 
Imagine that during the 2022 midterm elections, polling places are being bombed while the lines of voters outside are being sniped at. The county clerks’ offices are stormed and ballots burned. Winning or rival politicians are killed. Eventually, it begins to filter down to attacking political gatherings, rioters attacking union picket lines, or simply murdering one’s neighbor for voting for the other guy. Gangs of angry urban minorities fan out into the suburbs intent on robbing and looting for food and the things they were promised. All the while the DMV needs you review your social media and browser history to renew your driver license.
 
Now to make it worse, imagine you are hungry—starving—victim to criminal predators, sectarian violence, and in the midst of all of this, prey for whatever military/security force exists. The government is openly corrupt. The police harass you and do nothing to stop the criminals, all the while racist gangs terrorize your family. Maybe one day they do come to confiscate the guns of Trump voters because too many Democratic voters in roving gangs are being shot.
 
So no, the civil war isn’t going to start over gun control. It’s too niche of an issue for the average person to do the unthinkable and throw away everything over. Hell, most people who own guns are no more “gun people” than people who own cars are “car enthusiasts.” What faces us is a political, demographic, and economic nightmare that will drag us all into its swirling net before we find ourselves at war with each other. Just because all the components for a cake are in the cupboard, one doesn’t spring into being. Only once all the ingredients are in the bowl, mixed, and put under heat does the baking begin.

Required reading (quoted above): Monster Hunter Nation, THE 2ND AMENDMENT IS OBSOLETE, SAYS CONGRESSMAN WHO WANTS TO NUKE OMAHA

Hi, my name is Carl Sarkisian and I was a gun grabber. Before I had to flee to New Zealand, I was the senior implementation architect for the largest gun safety organizations in America. We were the top dog among all the non-profits in the gun control game, so as the chief brainstomer, it was my job to come up with, develop, and implement how we’d transform America unto a gun free nation. It was my idea; I take all the credit for it.
 
The question was “How do we get rid of all the guns?” America was, and still is, a country awash with guns. Our official projections were all over the map—from 100 to 150 million guns, half a gun for each citizen, to well over 600 million guns. No one really knew what was out there, lost in the back of closets, wedged behind dusty headboards, hidden in attics, buried in backyards, etc. I remember one guy brought boxes and boxes of guns, something like 500 in all, to a surrender center. Turns out he didn’t own more than 50 rounds of ammo; he was just some hoarder like a crazy cat lady, but with guns.
 
When we announced gun registration, it went over like a wrapped turd. One of the congressmen who supported the announcement was shot in the back while jogging a couple weeks later. No one ever found who did it or where exactly the shot came from, but the FBI figured that some lone shooter hid out in the woods a couple hundred yards away and sniped the congressman in the back. Never be predictable and always run on a treadmill.
 
There were some protests, of course, but standing around politely with your rattlesnake and Confederate flags does nothing, even with a rifle slung over your shoulder. It was the lone wolves that were the problem. Local offices of the alphabet soup federal law enforcement agencies were variously shot up or burned. A couple agents got killed. And of course a dozen state and federal politicos were assassinated. More fuel for the fire.
 
An old joke in Washington is that Social Security is the third rail of politics; touch it and you’re dead. The Second Amendment was really touch of death for politicians. The gun control push after that retard in Connecticut killed all those kids was what flipped Congress to the Republicans in 2014. We got a couple states to enact common sense gun control laws in 2013, but not enough. We focused on the weak states, ones with Democrat governors and Democrat controlled legislatures. Connecticut was in the bag, they even mandated retroactive registration of assault weapons and high capacity magazines! New York passed its SAFE Act, which wasn’t as well thought out as it could have been, but it was still a victory.
 
Out west, we got Colorado in the bag to ban high capacity magazines and pass universal background checks to close the gun show and internet loopholes. Oregon just took a little push to enact universal background checks too. We almost had Nevada, but the trailer trash living in their tar paper shacks in Pahrump and the rest of that godforsaken wasteland rang Governor Sandoval’s phone off his desk and he vetoed it. But we were learning and we finally found our silver bullet in the silver state in 2018.
 
Losing in Congress in 2013, even with all the momentum we had—god I love dead children—we had to come up with some sort of strategy to defeat the NRA. Congress is a fickle bunch; once the gun nuts start doing the bidding of the NRA you can bet those weasels run away from the party phone booths begging for donations to tell Mr. and Mrs. Camo Jacket that they’ll be happy to sacrifice some school kids to the murder cube. Like I said, losing in Congress when we had a crisis to exploit made us sit back and think hard. No, the federal strategy wasn’t it right now.
 
At the federal level, gun “rights” opponents were too powerful, too unified. A win a the federal level was the grand prize, a full victory in one fell swoop. Yet the absolutely irrational public reaction made it impossible. I was as dumbfounded as the rest of us. Violence was at an all-time low and no one really needed guns. People were fairly supportive of gun control. For the times we were living in—we had a Black president for heaven’s sake—the bitter clingers wouldn’t let go of their guns and they were growing. More people than ever were buying guns even as kids died and terrorists shot people up. Mystifying and illogical.
 
Defeated at the federal level, we took it to the states. Nevada made us learn that we couldn’t count on Republican governors (and especially Republican legislatures) to do the right thing and pass common sense gun laws. Common sense is actually uncommon. So we took it to the voters. We won on the ballot like we did in Washington, twice. Okay, we lost in main, but we taught Nevada a lesson by stealing the governorship from that worthless attorney general.
 
Direct democracy was a godsend to us. The Founding Fathers knew the potential dangers of mob rule and instituted a representative republic form of government. All in all, the wise men elected to office did a pretty good job of keeping things in order over the years. However, one little thing those old men in white wigs didn’t count on was when the mobs convinced Congress to drink whatever Kool-Aid the mob was drinking. Had the Congress of 2013 had any backbone, the gun lobby would have been SOL in 2013. Not so, unfortunately.
 
In response, we turned direct democracy on its head. Refuse to pass common sense gun laws? Well the public knows better and many states give voters the power to pass initiatives to circumvent an obstinate elected government. All we had to do was an initiative on the ballot, get the correct message out, and get people to vote “yes.” It was astonishingly easy to do. Like our strategy for getting legislatures to pass common sense gun laws, we chose our battlegrounds carefully.
 
The goal was momentum and so we had to choose our targets carefully. The qualifications were: rural state with a large urban population, a large percentage of the state that leans Democrat, large numbers of non-whites or other minority groups, strong initiative systems, and traditional “gun friendly” states. To begin, we went West. Colorado was a great experiment and luckily they had the right kind of politicians in office. Washington needed a different approach, and as luck would have it, I-594 fit the bill perfectly.
 
I-594 was about closing the gun show and internet loophole by passing comprehensive background checks on all gun sales, though we were fond of calling them “universal background checks” at the time. Private gun sales were a huge thorn in our side. People buying and selling guns on the side invalidates prohibited person restrictions and would ultimately negate gun registration. At the same time, you can’t have effective background checks without gun registration, because unless the cops setup a sting or someone is dumb enough to confess, you can’t prove who owned the gun or there really was a background check run. It was a Catch-22 and horse/cart problem, but we had to start somewhere and gun registration would mean pitchforks, torches, and hot tar (if we were lucky).
 
So we went to Washington and hit the Puget Sound region hard. All those urban votes and Democratic voters, plus the plethora of California expats. Oh how I love ex-Californians! That’s how we took Colorado over the years and will eventually take Texas (I prefer to think of Austin as center of spreading enlightenment, not a tumor). The good folks at Michael Bloomberg’s groups (despite the names, it’s a conglomerate with franchises) led the charge with grassroots efforts. Okay, Astroturf, not grassroots, but those idiots in the voting booths couldn’t tell the difference and for that matter, neither could the true-believers who wore the orange shirts.
 
It took millions to win. There were the usual costs; staff, stickers, signs, billboard, etc. but we still had to get on TV. TV was the real winner; a thirty-second ad featuring cops, moms of dead kids, and filled with images of crime scenes sealed the deal. Who in their right mind could be for arming criminals? Pass this law and keep your neighborhood drug dealer from selling guns. If your ex-husband is threatening to kill you, this will keep him from buying a gun. Do you really want some psycho white kid to buy a trunk full of assault weapons and show up at your baby’s elementary school for target practice?

Even so, it wasn’t an overwhelming win. 60/40 is not a real victory nor is it overwhelming support. The NRA, pretty much the only group really to fight back, screwed up big time. Not enough money, volunteers, or commercials and splitting the votes with their own confusing pro-gun (pro-death) initiative was stupid. Still, we won and that’s the important thing, despite the wishes of the gun huggers and the racists who lived east of the Cascades. I say let them break off and form their own skinhead ‘Redoubt’. In time, the inbreeding, violence, stupidity, and the cold will take care of them.
 
That win was just the shot in the arm we needed. The initial stages were already set in Nevada and Bloomberg had people out collecting signatures for the petitions. There were a lot of screw-ups on those petitions. Thankfully Nevada is such a small state that none of the counties had the ability to seriously check the signatures. We could have bought the judges if we needed to; the judiciary there is as corrupt as a banana republic.
 
All those ex-Californians were what we were counting on, plus the blacks who hate guns because their kids shoot each other up all the time, and the Hispanics who seem to fear guns almost as much as they used to fear “La Migra.” Those are about the only two groups who should have any legitimate fear over gun violence, but we saw the most support from the liberal white Cali ex-pats who came to Nevada for the cost of living and stayed for the no income tax. Soccer moms and the elderly pearl-clutching grandmothers were our bread and butter. Few people are so gullible and easy to manipulate as liberal women…and I’ve had my share.
 
It was a long, uphill fight to get comprehensive background checks passed. Ugh, I choke on the name. Saying things like that so much tends to warp your thinking. Let’s call a spade a spade; we were banning private gun sales and transfers by forcing them all into dealers. More on that later. “Comprehensive” or “universal”, it doesn’t matter what you call it, it still means background checks on all gun sales. We couldn’t tell the truth that a minority of guns are sold privately, or that guns don’t show up at your door via Amazon Prime. So we implied that there was a significant portion of gun sales that were not background checked, in other words, that background checks were woefully incomplete

The average jackass voter understood the message as “People can buy guns without background checks?” We didn’t tell them that background checks don’t really work, or that failed background checks are rarely prosecuted or even charged, and we didn’t tell them that gun shows have far more licensed dealers than old men trying to get rid of their gun collections. The public thought that more background checks would stop their abusive husband or the gangbangers next door from buying a gun. We didn’t tell them that there was no way we could stop the drug dealers and crooked licensed dealers from still selling guns, or that background checks couldn’t detect the crazies who looked normal, like the guy who shot up the Batman premiere in Colorado, or that background checks would have no way to tell if a girlfriend was buying the gun for her felon boyfriend.
 
Background checks weren’t the point; they were never the point. They don’t do a damn thing and only give the DA an extra charge after the fact, if that. No, background checks were a means to registration and an easy way to sell our framework to the football obsessed losers who spent hours learning every detail about the gorillas smashing into each other on the field, but couldn’t take five minutes to read or think critically.
 
Yes, we capitalized on the laziness and ignorance of the American public. People can say “no” to gun registration and “no more gun control,” but no one could vote no to “background checks on all gun sales.” “What do you mean we don’t have background checks on all gun sales?” Donny Dumbass asked rhetorically while he waited for the Raiders game to come back on. Thank heavens idiots like that can barely read, or else we might have been sunk when he realized he couldn’t borrow his brother-in-law’s hunting rifle for deer season.
 
We had to get the guns into gun dealers for sales and transfers and that is what the initiatives were about. Every gun sold by a dealer was recorded on an ATF Form 4473, which includes the buyer’s information; this was the form that was used to facilitate the Brady background check via the federal or state system (it differed from state to state). Dealers were required to retain the forms for 20 years or surrender them to the ATF upon closing or going out of business. The ATF would store the forms in a facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
 
Way back in the 1920s, one of the proposals to gun down on gun violence then was sales records and waiting periods for gun purchases, generally for pistols. Dealers would keep a record that police could later inspect, or like in California, there would be a short waiting period and the records delivered to the police for inspection. Without computerized background checks, it was a mostly after-the-fact system, or optimistically, if a cop recognized a felon’s name on the sales record the buyer could be arrested when he showed up to pick up the gun.
 
California’s registration system involved reporting their state form, the Dealer’s Record of Sale (or DROS), to the state Department of Justice. First it was pistols, then it became all guns later on. Eventually, all new guns sold (or used ones) by dealers were automatically registered upon their sale. California then banned private guns sales, first handguns, then long-guns, eliminating any loopholes. Thus anytime a gun changed hands legally in California, it became registered with the state.
 
That was the inadvertent geneses of the transaction based gun registration system. It was oh so easy to sell it as background checks because the registration forms were the background check forms. Guns have to get a background check to be transferred; it just so happens that they are registered on the basis of that transaction. This was only possible because California had an in-state system that could run and track the background checks as well as save the data for the gun registry. Separate registries for each state would be ineffective and once again negated by states without background checks.
 
That’s where the NICS (National Instant Check System) requirement came into play. NICS was the FBI-run background check system established by the Brady Bill. States had access to the same data if they wanted to run their own system. It doesn’t matter if state systems were better because they had local or mental health records in them or not. Again, live I’ve been saying, it was never about background checks. You don’t need background checks if guns are illegal. Anyhow, by forcing the states with local systems to use the NICS system for private checks, we create an unnecessary burden on dealers and duplicate the process. Since in most states, initiatives can’t be easily altered by the legislature, it was basically an encouragement to streamline the state into going federal. It was also a foot in the door for how we would ultimately register guns.
 
I don’t know exactly who came up with the domino effect strategy, but it was brilliant. We would never win states like Idaho, Utah, or anything in Redneckistan, and as I explained earlier, taking the country as a whole was too big of a bite to chew. As the states began to fall, momentum began to build. Once we had enough states that adopted our background check laws, we would have enough to go to Congress with and have it made national. Having a majority of states all on the same page would invalidate any argument that it should not be a national system. 
 
For years, states with strict gun laws complained about their lax neighbors. Most crime guns in New York City came from all over the country, usually smuggled up from networks that involved people with clean records buying guns from dealers. Thefts and abuse of private gun sales were in there too, but usual it was some sort of buyer fraud or dealers who were in on the scam. This “iron pipeline” stymied gun control and frustrated the cops. Dubious interstate enforcement methods and political pressure were used, but they didn’t work. The easy access to guns in other states had to be ended.
 
This is where the background check ruse and public safety came together. Why should Idaho, with its lax gun laws, be the chief supplier of crime guns to Washington? Why does Arizona allow Los Angeles gang members to buy guns in their gun shows to take back to California? With 33 states requiring background checks on all guns sales, why allow the minority of states to supply guns to criminals elsewhere? We finally had a compliant Congress and president in office and the 33 states ganged up on the 17 other states. With a critical mass of states using the federal system for private background checks and banning private gun sales, the rest of the states had to go along. Thank you interstate commerce clause, we got our federal comprehensive background check law in place.
 
It became a federal crime to sell or transfer a gun without first going to a licensed dealer who would perform a background check using the federal NICS system. All states with their own background check system had a year to transition. What happened next was truly fortuitous and changed our strategy.
 
When the economy collapsed, it created a glut of violence in the cities. Good for gun sales. Things looked grim for a while, but then we had the _______ School massacre. While it was rural, it was in an ultra-liberal state where no practically no one owned guns. It was too small of a town and county to have a need for a school resource officer or armed security. What were a bunch of little kids going to do?
 
Anyhow, fast forwarding, the killers took advantage of the lack of law enforcement. By the time the two deputies who patrolled that part of the county and their state trooper counterpart arrived, thirty-odd kids and teachers were dead and the rest herded into the gymnasium. As every cop in a hundred miles poured in, the killers took their time committing truly unspeakable atrocities. Yes, the two killers were shot (or killed themselves) immediately thereafter, but the damage was done.
 
The killers had bought their firearms legally in Idaho and Arizona because they heard all the news reports on how easy it was to buy guns there. Nevermind that all but one was bought from dealers legally because the killers were smart enough to get in-state driver’s licenses. Locating the guns sold took two weeks of full-time frantic efforts of the FBI and ATF because the records of the thousands of dealers in the state had to be checked manually.
 
Reports of potential co-conspirators and other threats ran rampant. Americans ran out like scared sheep and bought more guns. Things exploded when the FBI released emails from some terrorists guru in some Middle Eastern country telling them how they can buy guns easier than building bombs. Guns were easy to get and a surer way of getting kills than unreliable homemade bombs made by amateurs. Besides, American killers preferred guns to bombs.
 
When no co-conspirators turned up, just the total exploitation of the system because none of the men had any criminal records, we focused on Darryl Wayne Drover. Drover was a 69 year old man who sold the Glock pistol he didn’t care for to his friendly neighbor “Moe” who said he was afraid of some men who had threatened him. That last part, clearly a lie, we conveniently got dropped from the narrative. Drover was prosecuted successfully on federal charges, but the accessory to murder charges were thrown out before trial.
 
CNN, MSNBC, the Times, the Post, and all the other mainstream media outlets we owned (figuratively speaking) all helped beat the drum for gun registration. We could have ruled out the co-conspirators sooner had we known where the guns came from. It would have made the investigation easier. Maybe, just maybe, if we had gun registration, the suspicious purchases (that weren’t really suspicious) could have been identified sooner. Gun registration could have (would have!) stopped this from happening!
 
California led the charge for gun registration. They even threatened sanctions and lawsuits against states that didn’t vote for it. Legislatures convened, mostly in opposition, and fat “patriots” in old army fatigues assembled in parks to wave their assault rifles around. Congress passed our gun registration program, simply requiring all NICS background checks to be stored by the government in a computer database. Just simple reporting of the ATF Form 4473s, is all it was.
 
Everybody saw through that, but it wasn’t meant as anything more than a smokescreen. We didn’t want them to catch on to the other requirement, the one that required all completed Form 4473s to be archived and searchable in a federal computer database. Before too much of an uproar began, we tasked the ATF with a crash project to scan the forms they already had.

Countless forms were stored in physical format in National Tracing Center in West Virginia. By federal law, which banned a gun registry, searching the forms was a manual process that involved opening boxes, pulling open drawers, or scanning microfilm, for the record needed. Despite the cumbersome process, it was quite effective and far quicker than one might assume. Our problem: it was a giant fire hazard. I had nightmares of hillbillies descending on the building and making bonfires in the parking lot.
 
First, we digitized all the Form 4473s. It wasn’t too hard to do; we setup a warehouse filled with optical scanners, the rotary kind, and had a bunch of federal contractors from a temp agency feed them through. Some wonks from a university somewhere funded on a grant paid for by a certain billionaire obsessed with telling people what was good for them wrote up some custom software.
 
The software did most of the work, but the nature of handwriting made it necessary to have someone look over the questionable scans and verify the handwriting was correct. For $20 an hour, damn good money for glorified data entry, a bunch of old ladies whose chief experience in life was medical transcription and staring at microfilm doing genealogy research did the work. Those old ladies were pretty good. Anyone else would have gone batshit from staring at shitty handwriting all day. “Is that a P or is that a Q?” That’s what they did, plus spot-checking random samples of the computer OCR stuff to verify it was accurate.
 
In a few months, everything the ATF had was digital. Then came the hard part.
 
Now because the digital connections weren’t quite as complete as we hoped (partly true and partly an excuse), ATF had inspectors go out and copy all digital records that dealers had. Many used tracking software for their own purposes while some used electronic Form 4473s. The inspectors just lied, saying they wanted all the records since the registration requirement began, but scooped up any electronic records there were to be found. The dealers knew they had been crossed, but had no recourse other than to post on some nutjobs blogs and the discredited corners of the internet.
 
Once that was done, we required all the paper records to be surrendered, which meant that if you bought a gun in the last 20 years, we stood a good chance to get your information. Dealers fought this one tooth and nail. Some burned the records and even started shooting. There was major pushback, but a few high profile raids and dead dealers solved the problem. Most were picked up at night with no warning and a night service search warrant. “Sorry about the door!” the notes the agents left would read. The months long collection effort was a ton of work, but on the plus side, the raids and confiscations put plenty of dealers out of business. Many just walked away.
 
The 4473s from the dealers were scanned in like the rest, but we had to hire more workers to get the forms processed. It was nuts and a few of the data entry personnel just up and quit after staring at letters and numbers all day. In the meantime, lots of other things happened that sped up our confiscation plans. I was pleasantly surprised, which I needed, considering the alarming amount of ATF agents who were coincidentally quitting or transferring.
 
Initially, we had planned on an incremental approach. Senator Feinstein, herself a victim of gun violence, would have confiscated guns in the ‘90s if she had enough votes. “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in.” Over time, we lost the advantage we had because our politicians lack the courage to be decisive. So, baby steps, like we took knocking over the states on background checks.
 
First, it was background checks/banning private gun sales. Second, “gun violence restraining orders” where anyone could get a restraining order against any weirdo who had guns and might become violent. California really went above and beyond when they enacted ammo background checks and licensing, eliminated the “bullet button” loophole, and prohibited family gun transfers. They leapt a mile a mile ahead. I personally loved their safe handgun roster, where if a gun didn’t meet rigorous California requirements and be submitted for testing and approval (and renewed) the gun was illegal to sell in California. That significantly cut down on the number of first pistols, then revolvers, available in that state.
 
Since there was no practical way to register all the existing guns out there, all we could do is register the new ones sold and all the old guns that legally changed hands. Sooner or later (probably close to a century), virtually every gun would be registered. We planned to help this along with various registration requirements, like only registered guns can be carried outside the home, hunters must have registered rifles, handgun-only or assault-weapon-only registration, etc. We figured the narrow route would work, but still take a decade or two. What we needed was an opportunity (recall the Chinese word for opportunity is the same as for crisis) that would provide us the cover to require existing guns be registered.

To be continued...