They dissemble because they cannot go before the American public and reveal the truth that their goal is not to tinker around the margins of gun ownership rights but total confiscation because, (1) the United States Constitution gets in their way and, (2) the public will simply not stand for total confiscation. Because there is no political will for total confiscation the left seeks to do incrementally what it cannot do in a single stroke and cannot in any case do openly. Meanwhile, every duplicitous incremental step is resisted because it empowers criminals and renders the innocent defenseless. And because alert Americans understand that incremental steps are only stepping stones toward total confiscation.
Because the left's approach is essentially based on a lie, they cannot convincingly argue how each incremental step makes Americans safer when each step makes Americans more vulnerable. In fact, they do not attempt to make this argument, they do not attempt to relate specific regulations with specific crimes because the regulations invariably would simply not have prevented those massacres which give rise to the proposed regulations. Rather, they pander to emotions, to the human instinct to "do something" which is part of human nature but is seldom productive and often counterproductive.
The left also find itself inhibited by another underlying reality: a major part of the American public has lost confidence in the ability of the government to protect them. Americans have lost confidence in the essential fairness of our justice system and in its efficiency. They know that in an emergency situation a 911 call will not save them.
But more fundamentally, they know that the left since before The Warren Court has worked every angle and pushed every lever they could find to nurture a culture of criminality in America. For example, by definition every criminal who escapes conviction because his lawyer succeeds in throwing out evidence resulting from a search that has been declared unreasonable, puts a guilty criminal back on the street.
A second example, when the federal government releases illegal immigrants who are also violent felons into society because it is politically expedient to do so, rational citizens conclude that personal protection requires self help.
A third example and a personal bugaboo of mine, the drug culture which has now infected virtually every strata of our society not only breeds gun violence but finances it. Recently, a thread on FreeRepublic explored efforts in Chicago to prevent their gun violence which Chicago says could be prevented by prohibiting guns from being imported into the city from places where their purchase was legal. Not a word was spoken about how gun violence in Chicago relates to drug business in Chicago. A rational citizens looks at the situation and says, not only is the government failing to protect me but by its policies it is creating an environment that threatens me. I must arm myself.
So long as individualists (that means we conservatives) sense that collectivists are not only destroying our political system but also threatening us physically, we will seek individual solutions to problems generated by collectivists and, of course, we will resist collectivist solutions which fail and which rob us of our liberty.
Mr. Martinez, it is not the NRA that scares the shit of me, rather it is leftists who want "to do something" and can think only in collectivist terms, who in their grief would do more harm than good.
