This past twenty years have been good ones, all in all, for the Second Amendment Human Rights Movement.<\/p>\n
Even as the ratio of civilian firearms to citizens reaches 1:1 (double the per-capita ownership rate in 1968), the violent crime and firearm murder rates have dropped by half.\u00a0 The Supreme Court rejected decades of addled legal opinion with prejudice in the Heller<\/em> and McDonald<\/em> cases.\u00a0 And states with “Shall Issue” laws zoomed from eight 30 years ago to over 40 today (and “constitutional carry” states moving from 1 to 3 in the same time).<\/p>\n The orcs are desperate for a victory – even a symbolic one.<\/p>\n And some shooters are giving it to them.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n In the 1970s, the anti-gun movement set about an effort to stigmatize gun ownership.\u00a0 Civilian firearms ownership had long been a natural part of being a free citizen in this country.\u00a0 Great example – Minnesota didn’t even require a permit to carry a concealed handgun until 1974.<\/p>\n But in the wake of 1968 – with its high-profile assassinations (none of which would have been prevented by any level of gun control) and, more signally, cities full of black people rioting, the left embarked on an effort not only to ban guns legally, but stigmatize them socially.\u00a0 TV programming and movies started uniformly portraying gun ownership as unnecessary and dangerous at best, a sign of impairment or derangement at worst.\u00a0 And it sank in; by the mid-eighties, polls showed a majority of people favoring gun control, and a strong-plurality-to-majority having a low opinion of civilian firearms ownership.<\/p>\n And the news and entertainment media still keep that tack alive and well – although the rise of alternative media have effectively outflanked Big Left and Big Media; public attitudes about guns and gun owners have largely flipped.<\/p>\n But it took some convincing.\u00a0 One of the most important things to convince people of?\u00a0 That gun owners were real people, just like everyone else.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n When I first started hanging out with the Human Rights crowd twenty years ago – GOCRA and Concealed Carry Reform Now (CCRN), one of the first rules given to activists was “no camo”.\u00a0 Don’t wear camouflage to CCRN\/GOCRA events, gun shows and protests and hearings at the Capitol.\u00a0 Not just hunting camouflage, mind you – the paramilitary stuff was also a no-go.\u00a0 The movement needed to combat the impression thatbeinga shooter made someone inherently an outsider, self-consciously casting themselves out from society.\u00a0 We were fathers and mothers, students and lawyers, white and blue collar, Democrats and Republicans -peoplejust like everyone else.<\/p>\n Behind this was a simple bit of human psychology; the first step to taking someone’s rights away from them is to dehumanize them.\u00a0 To appear to be human makes that hard, if not quite impossible; at the very least, the other side has to expend much more effort, an unseemly amount, to keep dehumanizing you.<\/p>\n If they can’t turn you into a cliche that they can make people dismiss, then your playing field is more even.<\/p>\n And in the world of politics – which is where our laws get written – that’s important.<\/p>\n ———<\/p>\n But a group of shooters is doing their best to give the Orcs a new set of cliches on which to focus their rage.<\/p>\n