Gun control was started by slave owners who wanted to make sure that slaves couldn’t own guns. After the Civil War, gun control was used as a means to disarm freed slaves and make them helpless victims of the KKK. Now, the Democrats, who are the ones who started gun control, don’t trust anyone with a gun because they know that an armed populace will never accept socialism.
This article gets very close to what I think is the real political impetus behind the gun grabs of the past decade or so: the horrific, shocking, nay, almost unbelievable levels of violence among a subset of the urban population. Partly driven by the (now lost) war on drugs, partly by the failed welfarism that has destroyed many inner-city families and neighborhoods.
But the libs have a problem: they can't talk about this violence without talking about who's getting killed, and who's doing the killing. They HAVE to change the subject. And gun control has been their method of changing the subject since the Clinton's rolled into town. Of course, in phase II, having all of the guns out of private hands will make things much easier, as you point out.