Incremental Revolution: How Gun Rights Could Vanish Overnight

In an interview on MSNBC this week, former DNC chairman Howard Dean said that Bernie Sanders’ supporters should understand that America can’t and won’t change in an instant. “Incremental revolution,” he said, was the name of the game.

Liberal activists are known for their angry frustration. When they decide they want something, they want it yesterday. You can see it on every issue.

For conservatives, there’s a tendency to view this as giving us a little bit of breathing room. Sure, Democrats want to destroy the economy to “save the planet,” but these fossil fuel companies aren’t just going to sit back and watch. When your company literally keeps the American economy moving, it’s going to take more than an overzealous president to shut you down. And you can adapt that sentiment to just about anything you want.

That is, until you can’t anymore.

What Dean didn’t mention about “incremental revolution” is that you never know when, why, or how things will change. Take the environmentalist movement as an example. There was a small “green” activist movement in the 1960s, but it was mostly ignored by the mainstream. On Christmas Eve, 1968, that changed. As the world got its first look at the planet Earth from space, courtesy of Apollo 8, a true movement was born. It just took that one picture to inspire a generation’s worth of tree-huggers and an anti-capitalist war that continues to this day. Things grow slowly, slowly, slowly…and then they explode.

In a column last week, the NRA’s Chris Cox warned of Democrats using the term “common sense” to move the country towards disarmament:

Gun control advocates know full well that the American public does not embrace their ultimate goal of civilian disarmament. However, they are convinced this goal can be reached by gradually diminishing our rights over time, all the while purporting that each successive step is simply “common sense.” It is up to gun rights supporters to educate the American people about the ways in which gun control supporters deliberately conceal their true agenda to eliminate our freedom.

Cox is describing the “incremental revolution” that Dean was talking about. And when you take a step back from it, you almost have to laugh at how ineffective it has been. Despite all of their attempts, Democrats are really no closer to banning guns today than they ever have been. In fact, their constant rhetoric may be partially responsible for an increase in gun sales. Great job, guys. Keep up the good work!

But it’s dangerous to get complacent about their incompetence. You never know where the tipping point lies. You never know when one event, one speech, or even one picture might turn public sentiment against the Second Amendment. And when that happens, the Democrats will have all of the pieces in place to make mass disarmament a reality. If we wait until then to expose their efforts for what they are, it will be too late.