Recently, we published a story where I talked about the anti-militia bill being proposed. Now, understand that there’s been no real issues with current militia laws. No “militia” has gone around causing trouble or anything of the sort.
It doesn’t matter, apparently, because people on this side of the aisle have guns and will sometimes carry those guns and we can’t have that.
While talking about it, I focused primarily on how it would probably hurt training classes because that seems pretty clear from the text. I could have also talked about how it would impact pro-gun rallies, where people often carry guns yet have never caused an issue.
But over at The Gun Writer, Lee Williams points out that it goes even deeper than that.
We have the right to train with our firearms. We can draw from a holster, shoot while moving, practice CQB and send as much lead downrange as our bank accounts will allow. It’s all perfectly legal conduct, at least for now.
However, a new bill making its way through Congress known as the “Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act of 2024,” would make all of this illegal or at least suspicious enough to draw scrutiny from the feds. More importantly, it would paint a target on the back of every single American gun owner, which is the actual intent of this ill-conceived and extremely unconstitutional legislation.
To be clear, if Joe Biden ever signs this bill, the second he puts down his crayon the feds will flock to local gun ranges in numbers that will make it nearly impossible for actual members to find a place just to park. This bill would give them license to investigate anyone who trains with a gun in order to determine whether they’re a militia member — and don’t think for a second that they won’t.
The FBI recently investigated law-abiding Americans whose sole transgression was shopping at a Cabela’s or a DICK’s Sporting Goods. Evidently, the FBI, the country’s so-called premier law enforcement agency, wasn’t aware DICK’s stopped selling guns and ammunition eons ago. Nowadays, the most dangerous thing on their shelves is a pickleball paddle.
And they did that without the law being in place. We all know that it only gets worse if the law actually permits it.
I’d like to say that Williams is being alarmist on the matter, but he’s not.
I’d like to think that there’ll be no effort to investigate people just going to the range, that the bill doesn’t actually include that kind of thing, but I can’t. The truth of the matter is that the term “training” isn’t distinctly defined in the bill, not in any way that would exclude an individual taking his personal time to get in some target practice, anyway.
So yeah, it might actually open anyone who goes to the range up for investigation and possible prosecution.
Williams looked at it with a far more pessimistic eye than I did, at least in this regard–I did note that someone’s martial arts class could easily qualify as well, after all–and yeah, if this passes, we’re all pretty well screwed.
Is he right that this is the true intent?
It doesn’t matter. Whether it was the intent or just a gross case of incompetence doesn’t change the facts. Plus, while one should never ascribe to malice that which can be explained through incompetence, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
That’s what we have here and I don’t care to quibble about which is which.
All that matters is killing this bill so aggressively that no one ever considered such an egregiously unconstitutional effort again.
