The Ideal World is One in Which Who The President Is Doesn’t Affect Gun Rights

Donald Trump bill signing
 (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

[T]he president can do quite a bit. There are also things the president can’t do without Congress. Those include repealing the NFA and forcing interstate concealed carry reciprocity.

It’s ironic that gun rights are about decentralized power while being subject to the whims of the world’s largest centralized power. It might be better for gun rights to have one president instead of another, but the ideal world for gun rights is where it doesn’t matter who the president is.

We don’t live in that world yet … but in a way we kind of do. It would be an exaggeration to say that the president doesn’t matter for gun rights. Supreme Court appointments would be the obvious counter. But remember how this piece started: empirically, no president has taken an executive action to meaningfully strengthen gun rights. So it’s not that presidents doesn’t (sic) matter in principle, it’s that in practice, they pretty much haven’t. Nominally pro-gun and anti-gun presidents have come and gone, they’ve done pretty similar things, and gun rights are now ascendant anyway.

If the incoming administration enacts our wishlist, that would be great. But if they don’t, gun rights will keep expanding anyway. Culture is upstream of politics and technology is upstream of culture. If we get the tech and the culture right, the politics won’t matter.

— Open Source Defense in What a President Can Do

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2 thoughts on “The Ideal World is One in Which Who The President Is Doesn’t Affect Gun Rights”

  1. Ideal world.

    Liebnitz put forward the ‘Best of all possible worlds’ theory:

    Essentially, this world is exactly what God intended, so it is the best of all possible worlds.

    As Archie Bunker wisely observed: “God don’t make no mistakes. That’s how he got to be God.”

  2. Disagreed, though I would love it if gun rights continued to be “ascendant”. The politics ALWAYS matter and always will here.
    The left will continue to attack our Constitutional rights and will eventually succeed in undermining them even further.
    Though we’ve been granted a temporary respite, those attacks will resume in earnest in just over 4 years when the pendulum again swings left, maybe even sooner.
    It is inevitable. The globalists and “ruling class” here will not cease their attacks on our rights until either the UN Small Arms Treaty passes or the second US Civil War begins.

    They are too determined, prejudiced, and ignorant to do anything less. They think they can actually disarm America!

    Fools.

    Stock up and train. It’s coming whether you are ready or not.

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