United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- Assuming a favorable ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, many Second Amendment supporters think that the legislative battles will be over shortly. That would be a huge mistake. Anti-Second Amendment extremists won’t give up. If anything, they will take new approaches to attack our civil rights.
Why? Because they really see no limits. If they cannot ban the guns legislatively, they can find “short of banning” attacks to launch, some of which will be devastating. Worse, these attacks can often be made to seem very reasonable, particularly in light of Supreme Court rulings that take gun bans off the table. This is not to say we shouldn’t pursue those rulings, but the time to plan to defend against these attacks is NOW.
Here are some of the legislative attacks we could see:
Licensing and Registration Schemes
Licensing and registration has long been the “holy grail” for some anti-Second Amendment extremists. In fact, it has been noted earlier on Ammoland pages that Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to enact licensing and registration in the 1968 Gun Control Act. It didn’t happen, much to his displeasure.
Recent Congresses have seen several licensing and registration schemes emerge, though. There is the Sabika Sheikh Licensing and Registration Act, the Blair Holt Firearm Owner Licensing and Record of Sale Act, and the Handgun Licensing and Registration Act of 2021 among others.
Raising The Cost And Adding Red Tape
If they cannot ban guns, anti-Second Amendment extremists will certainly settle for making it more difficult for those who wish to exercise our Second Amendment rights to do so. This has taken a number of forms.
Some have sought to require gun owners to have insurance or to provide reimbursement for the “societal costs” of gun ownership. The former has been introduced at the federal level by Carolyn Maloney, while the latter is being pushed at the local level in San Jose.
How would those “societal costs” be determined? Why, they’d likely end up using “research” from the CDC to come up with the figures. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out which guns will be targeted for higher fees.
Then, of course, there is the possibility of expanding the scope of the National Firearms Act, which could make it far more difficult to obtain certain firearms. There is already one such version targeting semiautomatic long guns pending in Congress.
Litigation
We could also see a flurry of lawsuits intended to bankrupt gun companies. Despite the passage of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, Remington was sued into Chapter 11 bankruptcy over the use of a stolen rifle in the Sandy Hook shooting. Could there be other suits, especially given that anti-Second Amendment extremists were able to concoct a way around the PLCAA that SCOTUS didn’t stop?
The fact is, favorable rulings at the Supreme Court do not mark the end of the fight to protect our rights, or even the beginning of the end. Instead, as Winston Churchill once put it, they will make the “end of the beginning.” It will be imperative for Second Amendment supporters to work hard to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists at the federal, state, and local levels via the ballot box as soon as possible.
About Harold Hutchison
Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.