You can read the memo here (pdf), which outlines in no uncertain terms the fecklessness of what are being treated on the surface as largely symbolic measures.  We need to “do something” about “gun violence,” the argument goes, even if that “something” won’t have much of an affect.

And yet beneath that is something more incremental and sinister — and no amount of faux-sophistication, couched in ironic sneers or flip dismissals, from new “conservative” realists like Joe Scarborough, will convince we extremists and fringe Visigoth racists that we are but paranoid Birther haters, and that no one is coming after our guns.  Government by its very nature being good and just and caring — history to contrary to be bracketed as not our own; and the history of our own founding to be bracketed because, well, that was a long time ago, and constitutional fetishists really need to get over their nostalgia for the days of slavery and institutionalized misogyny.

From Defending Gun Rights:

The President’s executive actions and the legislation he is backing—such as Senator Dianne Feinstein’s so-called “assault weapons” ban and the New York gun-control template being implemented in the Empire State by Governor Andrew Cuomo—are just the stage-one set up.  These stage-one gun-control efforts, as the DOJ memo makes clear, are fully anticipated to fail, and that failure will provide the catalyst for stage two: Outlawing guns and confiscating them.

The memo lays the predicate for disarming America when it explains:

*Requiring background checks for more gun purchases could lead to more illicit weapons sales; but
*Convictions, mental health issues, and restraining orders can develop after the background checks.
*Banning assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines produced in the future but exempting those already owned by the public, as Obama has proposed, would have limited impact because people now own so many of those items; and
*Even total elimination of so-called “assault weapons” would not have a large impact on gun homicides, since assault weapons account for such a limited proportion of gun crimes (an average of 35 out of 11,000 annual gun homicides); however
*Gun registration and continuous checks for gun-possession eligibility and recovering guns from those that become ineligible for gun ownership will likely be effective; but
*The challenge is that most states do not have a firearms registry.

The implications of this memorandum are so obvious one doesn’t even have to read between the lines to comprehend that disarming America is the Obama Administration’s ultimate objective.  And, here’s how they intend to do it.

The key to the strategy is to create a national gun registry coupled with a sweeping set of new rules and regulations, taxes and fees, requirements and limitations surrounding gun ownership, all so onerous that virtually every gun owner inevitably will find himself or herself “out of compliance” and subject to having their guns confiscated.

This devious strategy already has been set in motion, and it was presaged in the letters sent out to veterans by the Department of Veterans Affairs in recent weeks.  These letters are a follow-up to the president’s expressed desire to force everyone through psychiatric screening as a pre-condition of being allowed to own a gun, using veterans as a trial run.  That letter says, in part:

“A determination of incompetency will prohibit you from purchasing, possessing, receiving, or transporting a firearm or ammunition. If you knowingly violate any of these prohibitions, you may be fined, imprisoned, or both pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Pub.L.No. 103-159, as implemented at 18, United States Code 924(a)(2).”

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not so bothered by what seems to be the reasonable attempt to keep firearms temporarily out of the hands of those suffering from severe post-combat stresses or mental illnesses.  However, I’m alarmed by who and under what conditions what comes to count as a “mental illness” for purposes of denial of natural rights is determined:  trial balloons floated include NIH “research” suggesting that the principles of our founding and framing, when adopted today, are indicative of a sort of dangerous terroristic streak, a sociopathy; while other scholarship suggests”conservatism” is a product of a chemical imbalance, or a product of some Freudian insight into our youthful assholes.

Once “science” becomes politicized, it becomes a terrible danger to liberty.

[…]

So you see, the strategy is first to turn everyone into a “lawbreaker,” which then can be used as the pretext for confiscating their guns.  Presto, Second Amendment erased.

The Father of the Bill of Rights, George Mason, predicted in 1788 that the government would someday attempt to disarm the citizenry unless there was a strong constitutional amendment barring government from doing ANYTHING to abridge the right of people to keep and bear arms, as the Second Amendment was intended to do. Mason said:

“When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually.”

Letting America “sink gradually” into a state of total disarmament is precisely what this president and many in this Congress on both sides of the aisle intend to do with their so-called “gun safety” laws.  It’s another Washington scam, and this time the scam is to circumvent the Second Amendment by first turning you into a “lawbreaker,” which will make you “ineligible” to own and weapon, and then, under the color of law, the government will disarm you.

[…]

The DOJ memo, written under the name of Greg Ridgeway, acting director of the National Institute of Justice and one of DOJ’s leading crime researchers, makes it apparent that the Obama Administration knows full well its executive actions and legislative proposals are destined.  Of course they will fail; THEY ARE DESIGNED TO FAIL, and to fail in a way designed to lead directly and inevitably to wide-scale gun bans and gun confiscation!There you have it.  Obama is playing a devious strategy to disarm America.  First he intends to label as many people as possible “mentally unfit” to own a gun.  Second, he intends to turn everyone else into a lawbreaker by putting so many onerous gun laws in place that virtually everyone will become “non-compliant.” Then using “non-compliance” with the law as an excuse, he will confiscate guns on the pretext that “lawbreakers are not permitted to own a gun.”  It’s the devil’s own logic.

During the Colorado Assembly “debates,” pro-2nd Amendment legislators (from both parties) were able to show, without any doubt, that the proposed laws were either unworkable or would not affect crime or criminals in Colorado. Instead, they would only burden law-abiding citizens and place onerous barriers to gun ownership on the most vulnerable and the poorest Colorado citizens.  In fact, the net affect would be to make those law-abiding citizens less safe, and embolden criminals — in a surreal twist in one legislative instance, using tragedies in gun-free zones to create a new gun-free zone on college campuses, treating adult women of voting age as children who are to surrender their first responder responsibilities to the buddy system or strategic whistle deployment.  Either that, or they can simply pretend they’ve got the clap. And their periods.

We understand not only what this Administration is capable of, but we understand its aims.  They aren’t those of “good men” trying to protect Americans and create a more connected civil society.  They are instead the aims of would-be despots out to fundamentally transform the system — part of which involves fundamentally changing the relationship between the people and their government, turning citizens into subjects, dividing us up into permanently warring identity factions, then creating of those coalitions of raw numbers that they hope will secure their power.  Worse, we now know that many Republicans are complicit in that strategy, because the idea of a permanent gentrified ruling class appeals to them.  And this is why we see them more and more adopting the left’s electoral strategies of pandering and promising — of more government and more government dependence.

It is crucial that we know and name who our opponents are in our fight to secure our liberties and to restrain a rapacious federal Leviathan that continues to try to delegitimate individual sovereignty, state sovereignty, the Constitution, and a stable rule of law.

Because the only reason to do so is to free itself from restraints on its power it has decided are illegitimate — using as its rationale the need to “nudge” us into proper behaviors deemed beneficial to the collective, or, in more candid moments, to “justify coercive paternalism” over and against the lie of a risky individual autonomy.