Snowballing

Anyway, we decided to give Jim, Chris’s father-in-law, a chance to experience some freedom, in the form of turning money into smoke and noise. I dragged out enough guns to cover the tailgate of my pickup, and Jim was pretty much awed. He looked everything over, and started asking, ‘What’s this one? pointing at each rifle and pistol down the line. I explained the pistols, revolvers, lever-action rifles, and semiautomatic rimfires in turn. Then he came to an AR-15. He said, ‘Is thet a machayne gun?’

So I explained that it was semiautomatic, and a machayne gun is automatic, but if you pull the trigger really quick it’s still a lot of fun, although it’s hard to hit a barn that way, even from the inside, with the door closed. He picked it up and stared at it, and said, ‘And this is laygul?’ I assured him it was laygul, because in America we have something called the right to keep and bear arms, and there’s still some of that right left, although it’s been eroded badly since 1934.

The point is that Jim’s face looked a lot like those girls eating Ranch for the first time. He’d shot single- and double-barreled shotguns before, but that was about it. And for the next hour or so he indulged in cordite overload of the first magnitude. He had a blast.

Watch the ranch dressing video here:

But if Joe Biden and the current batch of knuckleheads in Congress have their way, it won’t be long before such a pleasant evening among friends will be nothing but a memory. The House of Representatives just passed a bill that will eventually lead to registration of your old Red Ryder, if we don’t wake up and put a stop to it.

For years anti-gun politicians have been telling us they didn’t want to take our guns away, but you’d have to have the IQ of a spent primer to believe that. The so-called Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 would be enough evidence of their duplicity, even if there were no other indications. Another telltale red flag was when failed presidential and gubernatorial candidate Francis O’Rourke slightly tipped his hand on gun control when he said, numerous times, ‘We’re going to take your guns away.’ The gun grabbers aren’t even trying to hide their intentions anymore, which is kind of refreshing, actually.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed H.R.8, which is just the tip of the iceberg starting to roll down the hill, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors. If passed by the Senate, and Joe Biden remembers to sign it with the, you know, the thing, H.R.8 will serve as the next nail in the coffin of American freedom. And it only does two things.

When you apply to purchase a firearm at a gun shop, gun show, or over the internet, you have to pass a NICS background check. If the system is backlogged, which it often is, you have to wait three days to purchase the gun. H.R.8 would lengthen that time to ten days. Which is not a big deal, unless you’re a single mom being threatened by your homicidal ex, or something.

The other thing H.R.8 will do is require NICS checks on all gun purchases, even between private individuals. Which is a problem, since the only way to make sure that happens is to require each and every firearm in the country to be registered. The NICS system can’t handle the background checks required now, so I’m thinking it probably won’t do a lot better when it’s getting twice as many requests. Or five times as many.

But the main issue is registration, which is the first step toward confiscation, which is the goal, which we know because the antis have stopped pretending it isn’t. But even if all guns were registered, there’s no reason to believe that would reduce violent crime. Even the antis have an argument for that. They say if abortion is outlawed, it will still happen, just illegally. The same thing goes for gun sales, on a much larger scale, since far fewer people want abortions. I don’t plan to get one, myself, even if I get pregnant, which is statistically unlikely.

And it’s interesting that the gubmint wants more gun control when it’s effectively bankrolling citizen gun ownership. A recent Forbes article pointed out that Americans are overwhelmingly using their stimulus checks to buy firearms. So there’s that.

Me, I’m buying $1,400 worth of Ranch dressing . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor columnist and minister who eats Ranch with crackers, jalapeno dulce, and tomatoes just about every night. Write to him at [email protected]