Shooting Straight: As Biden’s SOTU Speech Made Clear, They Really are Coming for Your Guns

It’s an election year and we all know what that means: firearms will be used as The Great Evil by lawmakers as part of their elect-me-now platform. This was clearly stated by President Biden in his State of the Union address that he delivered last week.

Not only did Biden make multiple references to the “insurrectionists” of January 6^th—despite the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts issuing rulings that go quite contrary to the idea of an insurrection—but he went off on guns. Because of course he did.

In case you missed it, here’s a little recap of Biden’s gun-related ramblings:

…we must beat the NRA again! I’m demanding a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines! Pass universal background checks! None of this violates the Second Amendment or vilifies responsible gun owners.

Read that last line again. Biden doesn’t think gun control measures are contrary to the Second Amendment, and they totally don’t disparage lawful gun owners (or, hey, turn them into criminals overnight).

We don’t have the space to wander off into the weeds over interpretations of the Second Amendment or its history of racism, classism, and the flat-out murders that have followed gun control measures around the world. Let’s just agree that our forefathers didn’t write the Second Amendment only about muskets or militias and that any and all gun control is a violation of the Second Amendment. You’re welcome to fight me on that in the comments.

As a lawful gun owner, I certainly take offense at Biden’s words, which is admittedly nothing new. But is he really the worst offender here, or is the divisive nature of the firearms industry also at fault?

There are a lot of gun owners out there who think we’re just fine with revolvers and bolt-action rifles, because the AR-15 has no soul and semi-autos that aren’t 1911s are silly, anyway. The logic there tends to be hey, they aren’t coming after my personal favorite, so who cares?

Give a gun controller an inch—or a bump stock, or a pistol brace, or a binary trigger—and they’ll take the entire gun.

This is something I’ve repeated to the point of exhaustion. The tactical-looking stuff is just as valuable as the stuff with centuries of history and use backing it. If they come for the AR-15, they’re going to come for your 1911. And your revolver. And your shotgun.

These things are done by degrees out of necessity, because you can’t simply ban everything at once. Politicians have to sit the frogs willing gun owners in a pot of water and set it to a low simmer to get things going.

You’re going to hear me talk about my lever-actions right alongside my AR-15s (although I prefer the AR-10, if we’re being honest). And while people tend to assume I only shoot GLOCKs and that the 2011 is as close as I come to the 1911, they’re wrong. I’m an equal opportunity shooter. If it goes bang, I want one.

Again, it’s an election year, so what we say and do as gun owners will have an even greater impact than other years. If you’re going to run your mouth about gun rights, you should get involved. And if you want to complain about the election, you should probably vote.

Whether or not corruption has so thoroughly destroyed democracy that voting might or might not be totally pointless doesn’t really matter. You still vote, because not voting makes you complacent—or, worse, complicit.

All the diehard bolt and lever gun guys may be feeling a little smug right now thinking Biden’s State of the Union has nothing to do with them, but let me assure you, it did and it does. If you believe in the Second Amendment, in whole (as it should) or in part (whatever), then the President’s comments were directed at you.

Try not to forget how they’ve dropped the pretense and the narrative has flipped in recent years from “We’re not coming for your guns,” to “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

Some of you are going to say this is nothing but fear-mongering. But what it really is, is having a sensible understanding of the reality of the current climate. Owning firearms is a right that wasn’t granted to any of us by the Second Amendment, it was simply confirmed by it.

Yes, you read that right: the Second Amendment confirms our right to own firearms, it doesn’t give us the right. Unfortunately, the founding fathers vastly underestimated the idiocy of future generations, otherwise I imagine they would’ve written it with an eye for technological advancements, so-called “high-capacity” magazines and such.

We all know George Washington would’ve been all over an AR-15 with a 30-round mag. (And yes, the founding fathers knew repeating rifles existed long before the Second Amendment was even written.

Get out and vote. Get involved. Make some noise. Biden believes we’re all insurrectionists, and it’s past time to make it clear that gun owners are, in fact, American patriots. Our nation might not be what it once was, but for all its faults, it’s still great and we still love it.

American philosopher Robert Hutchins wrote that “The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from an ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” He was right. Here we are, mired in our own apathy, becoming increasingly indifferent to politics because we feel we can’t win anyway. What kind of Americans—and gun owners—would we be if we gave up?