Dear NRA leadership: are you out of your fucking minds?

Supporting a ban on bump stocks in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre is a terrible idea, for all the usual reasons that there has never been any case in the history of the known universe in which supporting a ban on firearms or their gear was a good idea. You used to know this.

How often has the NRA pointed out, correctly, that criminal and crazies don’t obey these ban laws, so they wind up only injuring the rights of honest citizens?

How often has the NRA pointed out that devices like bump stocks (and high-capacity mags, and silencers, and indeed entire functioning firearms) are easily and untraceably made in any machine shop?

How often has the NRA pointed out that the instant effect of bans is to produce flourishing black and grey markets that will supply the verboten item to anyone, empowering only shady middlemen who may be actual criminals?

How often has the NRA pointed out that these little incremental restrictions have to be refused because they’re part of a salami-slicing strategy aimed at eventually making full firearms confiscation first thinkable and eventually irresistible?

I can only interpret your posture on bump stocks as appeasement, a sacrifice offered to the gun-grabbers in hopes of placating them.

You used to know that this never works, that fascists cannot be appeased, and that concessions only embolden them. The gun-grabbers’ desire to reduce us from armed citizens to powerless helots will never cease at any destination short of the final one.

Gunfolks know that bump stocks are not in themselves a big deal – they’re a poor idea except in the unusual case that accuracy is unimportant. If you had offered to trade away legal bump stocks for a more useful reclamation of our civil rights, like say national concealed-carry reciprocity, that we might have gotten behind.

But this concession? This appeasement? This unilateral surrender? This is wrong. It’s a betrayal and a blunder.

For shame. You make me glad I let my membership lapse.

UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi chimes in with “They’re going to say, ‘You give them bump stock, it’s going to be a slippery slope.’ I certainly hope so.” This is why we must never give an inch, a millimeter, an angstrom!