The Embarrassing Truth About American Gun Control that Your Favorite Politician Won’t Tell You
Depending on your political or cultural alignment, I have some bad news. Actually, if you’re a red tribe gun owner or a gun proponent in general, you don’t even need to read this piece: it won’t be news to you.
For everyone else: gun control is dead in America.
If that sounds odd or scary or even absurd, you need to take a few minutes and just read this piece and come to grips about what it really means for you.
First, I want you to be honest with yourself, and to think if you know what any of the following phrases mean. Don’t google them. I’ll give you the definitions and context in a minute. And I promise, this exercise is not some kind of gotcha-trick. The following words and phrases are all KEY, IMPORTANT and RECENT developments when it comes to gun control.
Constitutional Carry
Heller
Bruen
Chevron
There are more, but if you don’t know any of these vocab terms, (as a friend, who wants the best for you) I have to tell you: you don’t know fuckin shit about gun control laws or their status.
So wherever you get your information, whomever you listen to when it comes to gun laws, or whatever thoughts or beliefs you have: you are wildly out of touch and misinformed in a way that only your truest enemy would prefer.
If you only know one, then you’re still in the dark. You’re uninformed to an absurd degree.
If you really know 2 or more, then great, you’re starting to get the picture.
The first one is Constitutional Carry and it’s the law in 29 states. In essence, (and there are a few small differences from state to state) it means that you can carry a handgun without a permit, either concealed or unconcealed.
That number is growing, up from just a half a dozen states 30+ years ago. It seems likely that nearly every state will soon be a Constitutional Carry state, and you might be asking “WHY?”
Good question.
The first big answer is Heller.
That was the 2008 SCOTUS case that basically wiped out many/most gun control laws, because it upheld the individual right to bear arms. The case centered around a Washington DC law that banned citizens from owning handguns, and required shotguns and rifles to be locked up and unloaded when not in use. Turns out, such laws infringe on the right to bear arms, according to SCOTUS.
But it gets worse.
Bruen came next. In 2022, SCOTUS ruled that “May-Issue” permitting was unconstitutional. Most states had already moved over to “Shall-Issue” permitting. The difference: May-Issue meant that a state could deny, delay or obstruct a permit to conceal carry a firearm for any or no reason. They may issue you a permit, they may not. Don’t like it? Too bad.
Shall-Issue means that unless there’s an obvious legal reason why you aren’t allowed to own firearms (like if you’re a convicted felon or there’s some kind of court order against you) then the state SHALL issue you a permit.
You can see the country slowly and then quickly start to unwind permit restrictions going back to 1986.
But the real nail in gun control’s coffin was the 2024 decision to overturn Chevron.
Chevron was a 1984 SCOTUS ruling that gave the Executive branch widespread authority to essentially create legislation so long as it fulfilled certain rules that didn’t step on Congress’s authority.
The problem: Congress is full of lazy, selfish cretins who actually prefer not to legislate, because legislating is hard and sometimes they make laws that people don’t like. For 40 years, Congress outsourced the dirty work to the Executive branch’s numerous (and growing) Cabinet agencies.
For any students of the Constitution, you might see a problem here. The whole point of Federalism is to have the Legislative Branch do the Legislating, while the Executive does the Executing and the Judicial does the Judging.
It’s called separation of powers, and just because Congress doesn’t feel like doing legislation doesn’t mean it should just hand over the keys to unelected bureaucrats in the Executive.
That was what the 2024 overturning of Chevron overturned: it said “hold up, no, the Executive can’t just do the Legislative’s job. No more.”
The ruling is key not just to gun control — but it is very important. That’s because many gun laws were created, changed, flip-flopped, uno-reversed and made up on the spot not by Congress, but by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, which as the old joke goes, should be a store, not a government agency.
It might sound silly, but there have been a number of laws that the ATF has drawn up on a whim to outlaw some cosmetic or insignificant detail about a specific firearm, which overnight turns a million or so law abiding gun owners into big time felons.
Then sometimes they would say “oh wait, no strike that and reverse it but here’s another tweak that makes a different group of hundreds of thousands of gun owners into felons.”
Normally you might think of a law as being something that’s voted on by Congress, and the good news is that appears to be the case following the overturn of Chevron.
The ATF (in theory) will no longer be able to just make up new gun regulations, nor will it be able to enforce any gun regulations unless they are specifically passed into law by Congress.
If most or all of this is news to you, then I want you to think very critically about the people who let you continue to believe that gun control was alive and well, on a farm with the other soon-to-be laws, instead of dead and rotting in the ground with your childhood pets.
These people either don’t know anything, or (more likely) they were happy to keep you in the dark because they appreciate your political or monetary or general support. All they had to do was pretend gun control was a thing and all you had to do was keep cutting them checks and punching the ballot.
The takeaway here: these people don’t think very much of you and they would prefer that you’re completely ignorant about the facts. Now I want you to try to think about the likelihood that they’re lying to you about anything else you hold dear.
