Are Republicans Coming for Our Guns?
Why the GOP may flip-flop on Gun Control
One cold morning in early February, a U-Haul truck pulled into a parking space in the small town of Lincoln Heights, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati. The cab opened, and out of the back goose-stepped a small mob of khaki-clad Nazi wannabes waving swastika flags and shouting their typical bigotry-filled nonsense. They marched over to a highway overpass and hung their Nazi flags over the edge, so the passing cars could see that hate is alive and well in America.
They would eventually be escorted back to their U-Haul by a combination of community members and police officers, but the police response was quickly criticized by the locals, some even calling their treatment of the Nazis “cordial.”
Later that month, another white supremacist was caught posting Nazi literature all over town, and while he was eventually asked to leave, law enforcement response lacked urgency according to several local citizens.
The community responded to the events and the lack of police response to them by forming The Lincoln Heights Movement, and its members started patrolling the streets and community events to keep them safe. And they arm themselves when doing so, making use of Ohio’s lax gun laws to open carry in public.
This would be a good time to tell you that Lincoln Heights is an historically black suburb, and the actions of the Lincoln Heights Movement are causing some to make comparisons to the Black Panther Party, which was actually named The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
In the late 1960s in California, when the Black Panthers were formed, local and state-level government responded quickly, and strangely. Republicans in the state legislature, who usually saw any gun control as an affront to their liberties … suddenly wanted lots and lots of gun control. So did their Governor, Ronald Reagan himself, who signed one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation at that time while claiming it “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.” The blatant racism in his language was coded, but it wasn’t coded very well. Everyone knew what he meant.
Right now in Washington DC, Trump and Musk are dismantling our government, and the agencies getting hit first and hardest are the ones that could potentially hold the administration accountable. Generals are being fired and replaced with sycophants, The Justice Department is being gutted and subjected to loyalty tests, and Trump and Musk have, to this point, simply ignored the courts. One by one, every possible impediment to their plan to turn the US into a Putin-esque oligarchy is being taken apart. Which brings me to my point:
At some time in the near or distant future, the next roadblock Trump and Musk will have to deal with will be the Second Amendment and the armed citizenry it created. The GOP may love their guns, but they do not love your guns.
While it is certainly possible that We the People will stop all this nonsense before we ever get to the point of disarming Americans, if one small community north of Cincinnati arming itself turns into fifty, a hundred, or five hundred, we will see the GOP flip-flop on the Second Amendment, and they will certainly come for our guns.
And if you need proof, just look up the gun laws in Russia and see for yourself what happens when authoritarians solidify their power.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days fighting for working families as the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show, and his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
Most Republican policies are appalling—benefitting the wealthy few who don’t need help at the expense of those who do. But if they get guns out of the hands of right- wing gun nuts, that might actually constitute a benefit to society.