The Enemy of the Good

One week ago as of this writing, I was in Summerville, Florida surrounded by fellow Second Amendment advocates. You can read a bit about that event here so you can start planning for next year.

Anyway, while there, I was party to a lot of conversations and I couldn’t help but overhear some others.

One thing that’s been gnawing at me over the last week is a recurring issue that I’ve seen, and that’s when is something “compromise” and when is it just a case of moving the needle on liberty as far as we can get it in the here and now.

Allow me to explain.

From time to time, some bill will come up in a state that restores some degree of gun rights back to the people. Most people are happy to see it, but some groups that claim they’re all about gun rights and “no compromise” will object to the bill. Why? It doesn’t go far enough. Maybe the change in off-limits locations still includes something like concerts–this is a hypothetical, for the record–and they want them at concerts. So, they object to the bill. They push their members to contact their legislators and demand they vote against the bill.

Why? Because it’s not ideal?

This is something that some people celebrate and others lament, and they lament it for good reason.

Let’s think about the phrase “no compromise” for a moment. Some very respectable gun rights groups, like Gun Owners of America, pride themselves on being “no compromise,” but what they’re talking about is different than the organizations I mentioned above. But their “no compromise” position has everything to do with how anti-gunners do things.

See, anti-gun jihadists like to make big asks, then offer to take a little less and call it a compromise. For a long time, Second Amendment supporters tried to be nice and accepted this “compromise” which wasn’t really a compromise. The other side just took less, which they then turned around and started trying to take the next legislative cycle. We got nothing out of the deal except a slightly lower level of infringement on our liberties. They took what they could get at the time and kept pushing.

By the same token, though, taking what we can get here and now isn’t compromising our principles. It’s moving the needle on gun rights back to where our Founding Fathers wanted it all along. Especially as we, too, can keep pushing in the next legislative cycle. GOA gets this and will take what it can get when lobbying lawmakers. Others? Not so much.

A lot of gun rights advocates are understandably frustrated with these organizations that ultimately work against gun rights by letting the good be the enemy of the perfect.

I have my own conspiracy theories about these groups, which range from them simply being grifts to them being anti-gun plants designed to take down the gun rights movement from within.

Regardless, they do a lot of harm, and even if every awful thing I think about them is untrue, they still do more harm than good.

We didn’t lose our gun rights overnight. It didn’t happen that way anywhere.

It’s foolish to expect lawmakers who have been told for decades that gun control is necessary to suddenly jump on board the gun rights train simply because we look at them and declare, “…shall not be infringed.” It’s not wrong, mind you, but that’s not winning any arguments. We need to take what we can get, then use that as leverage to justify continued restoration of our gun rights.

That’s not compromise. That’s how the anti-gunners who have seen so much success work. We can steal that idea and use it against them, and we should.