Don't worry, you get to keep your weapons

By Katherine Rumbaugh, PPP Spring Fellow

Last fall, gun rights groups were up in arms about their arms and whether then-candidate Barack Obama would be “the most anti-gun president in American history.”

And although not many NRA members live in North Carolina, 56% of the state’s gun owners reported being worried that Obama’s administration will take away their guns in our most recent poll.

That’s highly unlikely, even if he is the most anti-gun president yet. Obama might support moderately strict to very strict gun control laws – as do 78% of North Carolinians – but somehow I don’t buy the gun control slippery slope argument. It goes something like this:

1. Liberals push for moderate gun control legislation, such as a national identification system for handguns, then,

2. Sporting weapons are banned, and after that,

3. The government confiscates every kind of firearm from everyone (a la Great Britain in 1997), and finally,

4.Government-sanctioned genocide (as in Nazi Germany).

I may have skipped a few steps in there, but that still seems like a stretch, particularly in light of the Supreme Court case last year that struck down the handgun ban in Washington, D.C.

There’s that, and there’s the gun lobby pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into protecting our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Oh, and there’s the economic downturn, climate change, and the War in Iraq that the new administration has to deal with – and I’m guessing all three of those take priority over guns.

So calm down, pro-gun activists. Obama’s not coming around for your weapons just yet.

The full results of our poll here.