‘Roadmap’ Latest ‘Commonsense’ Ploy to Advance Citizen Disarmament

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)-  The 97percent “gun safety” organization purports to have a plan to reduce “gun violence” that can bring people on both sides of the issue together. In Part One, AmmoLand looked at a so-called “Policy Roadmap” put out by the group and examined its three “core principles.” In Part Two we examined the four policies we’re told promise to dramatically reduce gun-related homicides and suicides.

Of course, it will do none of that, but instead is just a “new” tactic to recycle to make old citizen disarmament ideas palatable to a critical mass of low-information Americans amenable to being manipulated by well-funded “gun safety” snake oil salesmen.

What makes 97percent’s “roadmap” all the more insidious is that the organization is (at times) successfully employing a “divide and conquer” strategy by claiming to represent both “responsible” gun owners (as if opponents are irresponsible) as well as “bipartisan” (that is, RINO) interests. We’re essentially talking Fudds and Democrat gun owners, who place faith in centralized government disarmament diktats and hostility to “deplorables” above uninfringed freedom for their countrymen. Out of such, we get groups like Giffords’ calculatedly-named Gun Owners for Safety, and “Republicans” like Joe Walsh, who capitalized on his supposed “pro-gun” bona fides to advance his political career and then “proved” them by “commending” David Hogg and endorsing Joe Biden.

Walsh was joined in a recent 97percent annual conference panel centered on the “roadmap” with other names associated with “gun rights,” including trainer and former Brady Campaign president ally Rob Pincus, the Heritage Foundation’s “properly crafted red flag”-endorser  Amy Swearer, and Stephen Gutowski of The Reload and now of CNN, all joining in to “legitimize” the show and demonstrating, wittingly or not, how “inclusive” those paying for it are. (Just to clarify: I do hope Gutowski continues to use his elevated platform to the best effect possible, and I support his efforts to educate a wider audience, but I also believe there’s something in it for “them” in terms of steering the direction of the discourse.)

What we’re seeing here is a manifestation of something I’ve warned about: “gun rights influencers” gushing over all the new gun owners without considering whether or not any votes have been changed. Because it’s not about guns, it’s about freedom, and if owning them were all it was about, we’d have no better pals than David Chipman and Lon Horiuchi.

With the conference over and the media all over the “roadmap” and the supposed “common ground” that it represents, let’s think it through together for a moment. Forget yet-unresolved questions posed by the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision for a moment and let’s say it all comes to pass and 97percent’s four policies are enshrined into law throughout the land.

Who thinks that will be it, and the jackals, now sated, will stop circling and go away?

Who thinks Joe Biden will give up on banning “assault weapons,” by executive order if he thinks he can get away with it, and ATF will stop legislating and “defining” via “rules”? We know what the end game is, no matter how much the gaslighting gun-grabbers want to ridicule us for repeating their own words back to them.

Believe Sen. Thomas Dodd, the principal force behind the Gun Control Act of 1968, when he asserted:

“I would be for abolishing all guns.”

Believe Handgun Control Inc. (the predecessor of the Brady Campaign) founder Nelson “Pete” Shields, when he told the New Yorker back in 1976:

“We’re going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily — given the political realities — going to be very modest. . . .  [W]e’ll have to start working again to strengthen that law, and then again to strengthen the next law, and maybe again and again.  Right now, though, we’d be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice.

Our ultimate goal — total control of handguns in the United States — is going to take time. . . .
The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country.

The second problem is to get handguns registered.

The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition-except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors-totally illegal.”

Believe Deborah Prothrow-Stith, who as dean of the Harvard School of Public Health wrote:

“My own view on gun control is simple. I hate guns — and cannot imagine why anybody would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned.”

Then believe Mark Rosenberg of the CDC who wanted to see guns “dirty, deadly and banned,” and former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens who made worldwide headlines calling for the Second Amendment to be repealed.

We could do this all day, but the point is made. Of course, “they’re” talking about taking your guns. That’s what it’s always been about, and anyone who says differently is either a liar or a fool.

Give in to 97percent’s “roadmap” and all it will do is remove an impediment in the long march to the end game. The grabbers will be back the next day with new demands, newly invented “loopholes” and new lies, accusing Republicans of refusing to “compromise” and the NRA of harboring “extremists,” all with the intent of swindling us out of our birthrights and establishing an unchallengeable monopoly of violence.

None of our rights are theirs to tamper with, let alone dictate on, and history more than adequately demonstrates the “common ground” such roads invariably lead to.