Gun control activists do not want to confiscate our guns. Really. Just trust them about it. They don’t. Instead, they just want to pass simple, common sense and reasonable gun laws that have nothing to do with confiscating lawfully owned property. Trust them. They really, really don’t want to take our guns. Really.

As President Barack Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008, “I believe in the Second Amendment. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away … But I am not going to take your guns away. So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don’t use that one because it just ain’t true. It ain’t true.”

See, it just ain’t true, like the President said. No lawmaker or politician will propose legislation that will confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens. Really. In fact, every gun control supporter is a huge fan of the right to keep and bear arms. Really.

I’m being sarcastic, of course. While most gun control advocates publicly contend that they “don’t want to take our guns” I think we all know that secretly, deep down inside, they really would like to take our guns away. Hence, all the questions that involve the word “need,” i.e. “Why do you need an AR-15?” “Why do you need a 30-round magazine?”

Implicit in those questions is, well, “If you don’t need it, then why should you have it?” Basically another way for them to say, “No one should be allowed to own that firearm with the scary cosmetic features.”

In any event, I’m sure there are going to be some folks who doubt this claim. So, for the skeptics who don’t believe that a large portion of gun control advocates really want to snatch up lawfully owned firearms, I’d invite you to consider the following:

1. Dianne Feinstein: “Dry up the supply”

Feinstein is the queen bee of the modern gun control movement. In the past, she’s flat out admitted that she wanted “Mr. and Mrs. America” to “turn em all in.”

“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an out-right ban, picking up every one of them… ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in,’ I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren’t here.” – Sen. Feinstein on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes,” February 5, 1995.

But beyond what the senior senator for California has said, she’s also gone to great lengths to push for legislation specifically designed to “dry up the supply” of certain, commonly owned sporting rifles over time, which seems to imply a de facto form of confiscation.

After all, if it’s illegal or impossibly difficult for one to own, manufacture, possess or transfer a certain firearm following the passage of her 2013 Assault Weapons Ban, that’s tantamount to confiscation even if there’s no government agent knocking on his/her door demanding him/her to turn it over.

2. NY SAFE Act

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s severely flawed New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act explicitly bans the possession of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, including those magazines that were grandfathered in under the previous Assault Weapons Ban.

This is confiscation, plain and simple. Here’s the proof, right from Cuomo’s NY SAFE Fact Sheet page:

Forced forfeiture of once lawfully owned property equals confiscation, at least that’s how I see it.

3. California’s Confiscation Task Force

As highlighted in a previous Guns.com article, earlier this month California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that will allow the state government to send out special agents to confiscate firearms from individuals who are prohibited from owning them.

Under the bill, the government will appropriate $24 million to hire 36 additional agents and run a records system that tracks individuals who had at one point legally purchased a firearm, but have since either been convicted of a crime or adjudicated mentally defective.

“This bipartisan bill makes our communities safer by giving law enforcement the resources they need to get guns out of the hands of potentially dangerous individuals,” Evan Westrup, a spokesman for the governor, told the LA Times.

While the intentions of this law are noble, it’s application can quickly devolve into something less idealistic, i.e. a way for the state government to disarm responsible gun owners who possess “banned” or “illegal” firearms or, pending a change in the parameters of law, a way to disarm anyone deemed “potentially dangerous.”

It hasn’t happened yet, but gun owners are duly concerned that it just might in the not too distant future.

4. New Jersey Lawmakers: “Confiscation, Confiscation, Confiscation”

Sometime last week some New Jersey lawmakers — Sens. Loretta Weinberg (D), Sandra Cunningham (D), Linda Greenstein (D) — were caught on open microphone mocking gun owners who feared their firearms would be confiscated:

“We needed a bill that was going to confiscate, confiscate, confiscate.” “They [gun owners] want to keep the guns out of the hands of the bad guys, but they don’t have any regulations to do it.” “They don’t care about the bad guys. All they want to do is have their little guns and do whatever they want with them.” “That’s the line they’ve developed.”

Yeah, so it was just a joke right? Maybe. But at the same time one can argue that it reveals their true thoughts about gun laws and gun owners. Because we value our right to keep and bear arms we don’t care about prosecuting or apprehending violent criminals.

Obviously this is not true. For proof of this, all one needs to do is check out pro-gun, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s video, which questions the president about his administration’s handling of violent criminals.

5. Missouri/Minnesota Bill

Lastly, the most convincing evidence that pro-gun control lawmakers really want to confiscate our firearms is legislation that seeks to do just that.

Back in February, several states including Missouri and Minnesota introduced bills that contained the following language:

“Any person who, prior to the effective date of this law, was legally in possession of an assault weapon or large capacity magazine shall have 90 days from such effective date to do any of the following without being subject to prosecution,” the proposed bill states.

Law-abiding gun owners would have the following options to ensure compliance with the law were the bill to pass:

(1) Remove the assault weapon or large capacity magazine from the state of Missouri; (2) Render the assault weapon permanently inoperable; or (3) Surrender the assault weapon or large capacity magazine to the appropriate law enforcement agency for destruction, subject to specific agency regulations. [..] 5. Unlawful manufacture, import, possession, purchase, sale, or transfer of an assault weapon or a large capacity magazine is a class C felony.

Here’s a video from Fox News that explains the bills in greater detail:

Conclusion

The biggest obstacle to the passage of real, common sense gun laws is trust. Gun owners just do not trust gun control advocates. Given the examples above, it’s easy to see why that is.