This Is How We Get Our Rights Back

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a rant by YouTube influencer and former congressional candidate Brandon Herrera. I happened to agree with it very much, and a lot of other people did as well.

A lot of people didn’t.

They prattled on about how this wasn’t anything and how everything less than perfection was a total betrayal by Republicans in Congress, etc. It all got very tiresome, really.

Years ago, my friend Lawdog came up with a metaphor for how we lost our rights that has since become very popular. He likened it to a cake. Each act of gun control started as some kind of “compromise” that only took part of our cake, but over time, what piece of the cake was left got smaller and smaller. It ends with the refrain of, “I want my cake back.”

It’s become so common in the gun community that most people don’t even know where it originated.

As it came from a friend, I do.

The reason I bring it up is that it relates to what Herrera noted in his video. Anti-gunners are content to take what they can get. They have to be, frankly, because they’ve lost so much ground over the past fifty years. In the 1970s their stated goal was banning handguns. Now they endorse Democrats who claim to own Glocks. So yes, they high-five each other after every little piece of cake they take from us, then get back to work trying to get another piece of it. They thank their lawmakers in the legislature and show them appreciation, then leverage them in the next session to try and do it all over again.

Too many people in the gun community don’t understand that.

They want their cake back, and rightly so, but they somehow think they’ll get it all back in one fell swoop. That’s not how it works. It should, mind you. I want them all back, and I want them all back right now. Every gun case the Supreme Court has heard in my lifetime had me praying for the unlikely outcome of the decision simply reading, “What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ do you morons not get?”

It’s never happened and, really, it never will.

Instead, this is where Herrera is right about taking a page out of the anti-gunners’ playbook. Take the wins. Even if it’s not the win you prioritized as more important, take it. Take it, show some appreciation to the lawmakers who fought for it, vote out those who refused to do so, and then get back to work the very next session. Then we take back another piece of the cake.

For me, it’s not compromise if we give nothing up except how much we take in the here and now. It wasn’t a compromise when they took our cake because we got nothing in return. I’ve talked about this previously, and it’s a hill I’ll die on if need be.

Let’s stop shooting ourselves in our own foot. Let’s work with lawmakers, support them when they do right, punish them when they don’t, and move the needle back bit by bit. 

As I said in that earlier piece, we might well be planting seeds for trees we’ll never sit under, but so what? We’ll still be better off on gun rights than our parents were, and we’re making the world better for our children.

We will never get them all back at once. It’s political suicide for far too many lawmakers for that to happen. We can nibble at the edges, taking bigger and bigger pieces until our rights are restored to where they should be.

The fight matters.

Winning it matters, too, though.