The notion that Democrats have suddenly lost their grip on reality ignores a longer pattern of policy choices that consistently treat firearms as the problem rather than the people misusing them. From the 1994 assault-weapons ban through the post-Parkland push for magazine restrictions and red-flag laws, the party’s instinct has been to expand the regulatory state around lawful owners while soft-pedaling enforcement against career criminals—an approach that data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports shows has little measurable effect on the violent-crime rates that actually drive public concern. What looks like fresh incompetence is often just the same reflexive aversion to individual self-defense dressed up in new polling language about “assault weapons” and “universal background checks.”

For the 2A community the stakes are straightforward: every time the Overton window shifts left on guns, the practical result is more compliance costs, more arbitrary prohibitions, and a cultural message that the right to arms is a negotiable privilege rather than a constitutional default. Recent proposals to tax ammunition, mandate storage requirements, or treat private transfers like dealer sales all follow the same logic—raise the friction of ownership until fewer people bother. The political irony is that these measures tend to mobilize rather than demoralize gun owners, producing record NICS checks and state-level sanctuary legislation precisely because voters recognize the pattern. In short, the “dumb” label may be satisfying shorthand, but the durable takeaway is that anti-gun incrementalism keeps generating its own antibodies inside an electorate that still values the ability to defend itself when government cannot or will not.