By Jim Wallace
“They Are Not Coming to Take Your Guns – It May Be Worse Than That.”
How many times have Second Amendment civil rights proponents heard that over the years?
One of the biggest fears of lawful gun owners is that they will have their property taken from, and they will be defenseless. Will it happen? Maybe that is not their plan at all, and that should be the most concerning thing! Why, you ask?
Over the last decade or so we have quietly witnessed what I truly believe to be a new strategy. Imagine the physical optics and the cost to force lawful citizens to line up and turn in their guns. It would be an enormous task and the fallout could be disastrous. A much more insidious plan is what Massachusetts has already begun to do.
In 2016, the Massachusetts Attorney General singlehandedly reinterpreted nearly two decades of established law. Literally overnight, she changed the so-called assault weapons laws to suit her own political purposes. The result was a complete ban on an untold number of firearms. At first people thought that the AG had grandfathered all previous transfers and ownership. GOAL had to inform them that they were incorrect. There was no grandfathering, the AG just chose not to prosecute at that time. That is when we coined the phrase, “Felons in Waiting”.
What had actually transpired is that anyone who had transferred/possessed one of the unknown guns since the 1998 law passed was now a Felon in Waiting. I actually ran into a few folks at a service station where I get my oil changed after the AG action. They were very concerned and asked if they should get rid of any guns that might fall under the new ruling. They were a little shocked when I told them it didn’t matter. That is because in the AG’s eyes they had already committed the crime. So even if they got rid of them, they were still Felons in Waiting.
In a similar fashion, bump stock devices were banned, but no one came around looking for them. The legislature simply made them illegal. So, anyone who still has one is now a Felon in Waiting.
What if the plan is not to go around confiscating our guns, but rather to turn a huge sector of our society into Felons in Waiting? Why is that so bad, or good for them, you might ask. Simple, what better way to silence and intimidate your political enemies by holding a felony charge over their heads. The prosecution of it would mean imprisonment and the loss of all of their civil rights, not just the Second Amendment. This strategy costs virtually nothing, they don’t have the optics of confiscation, and they can carefully select who they enforce it against to make an example.
Imagine a nation with a hundred million or more carrying over their heads the label of Felon in Waiting? So maybe they really aren’t coming to physically take our guns, but our liberty as a whole.
Wallace is executive director of the Gun Owners Action League of Massachusetts.
