1 People say it kind of regularly. Almost depressing, really. You don't see people saying "you have a right to a free press, but we can ban ink!" or "you have a right to religious worship, but we can ban churches!"

But ammunition control doesn't work because you can manufacture your own ammo as well... and even if you couldn't, surely we're not laboring under the impression that banning it would actually prevent criminals from getting it? The War on Black Powder wouldn't work any better than the War on Drugs.

2

...which hasn't prevented them from waging the war on drugs.

3 I thought about writing a post about this: it isn't criminals that the gungrabbers fear. It's actually the law-abiding gun owners they want to disarm.

4 Indeed.  Its not even really about the guns, per se.  Its about the ideal of self-defense.  People who believe in defending themselves are more independent of mindset, and independent people are harder to get to do what they "should" do, "for their own good."  Take away everyones' guns and get everyone to accept that they aren't supposed to defend themselves, they are supposed to rely on the state to defend them, and you get people who are much more pliable.

5 It's actually quite a bit deeper than just that, metaphysician.

I got a chance to talk to a former Leftist a bit over a year ago and he explained the interior thinking this way.   The reason the Left will try to take all Power upon itself and fears (to the core of its being) someone else having actual Power is that they know what they would do with that Power, if the shoe was on the other foot.  They fear themselves, then think that other, functioning groups in a society are just like themselves, so they want the Power to prevent others from doing... what they *know* they would do to themselves.

It makes a lot of sense when you merge together the thinking of the Progressive Movement from the 1880s to 1920s and the Marxist philosophy that's taken over much of the academy.  Your either the Oppressor or the Oppressed; the Government can put Top Men on the job;  We're all the same, just with minor differences in appearance.   This is the thinking they subscribe to, and it dictates completely how they respond.

The end result is that their political thinking resembles the way a clique of 12 year old girls operate.  And that isn't a joke.  It's that level of self-delusion to reality.  Which is why absolutely Zero logic will work on the truly hardcore ones.  Their assumptions about reality are just too far removed from the actual way things operate to capture actual functionality.   Still, it doesn't effect their ability to perform jobs, carry out tasks or otherwise live.  Which is how they've managed to make such large organizations that exist to make the lives of everyone worse (in practicality) even when they think they're helping.

So, they fear those that abide by the law.  They don't fear criminals as they already have Cops to deal with that or they already own a gun themselves, normally from a "may" issue State.  Crime and Safety are easy to deal with when your opinion & political elites are closed off from the rest of the world.

6 Lest anyone doubt sqa's "the Left [...] fears (to the core of its being) someone else having actual Power is that they know what they would do with that Power, if the shoe was on the other foot," plenty of lefties have come right out and said they want to ban guns because they know they would be tempted (apparently beyond self-control) to just go wild.

7 Avatar_exADV, having been the stupid teenager who thought that "there's no right to bear bullets" was clever...

It makes a lot of sense when you don't have any real concept of the Second Amendment as anything more than a weird archaism (which, prior to recent Supreme Court decisions, "everyone" agreed it was) and have no understanding of the anti-gun control argument other than "crazy people want to stop us from making everyone safe because they are crazy".  From that perspective, you're not weaseling your way around a constitutional right, you're countering exploitation of technicality with another technicality.

8 Sqa, they usually don't have guns themselves, but armed bodyguards, like Bloomberg and Jim Carrey. Sometimes the bodyguards have illegal guns, like the one for the head of Media Matters.