Quote of the Day - Trust and Compromise

Eric S. Raymond considers the gun control debate and the lack of trust that pervades the political landscape:

Any trust that “gun control” will be administered with even minimal respect for civil rights is long gone, destroyed by the behavior of the enforcers themselves.

This is yet another way to destroy the middle. Anti-firearms activists speak of “common-sense regulation”, knowing that the agencies enforcing these have engaged in a series of criminal conspiracies to evade and ignore safeguards against abuse of such regulations. By doing so, they annihilate any trust firearms owners might have once felt that “common-sense regulation” is anything other than a prequel to those abuses.

In the absence of trust there can be no compromise. This is how you radicalize gun owners into the Second-Amendment absolutists most of us are today. After four decades of bad faith the only position left to us is “No more ‘gun-control’ laws. Ever.”

It is very interesting to see the number of commenters who have fetishized compromise uber alles, and who keep arguing that gun rights advocates need to compromise compromise compromise or Bad Things Will Happen In The Next Election.  I guess we'll see in 18 months, but the recent Senate votes suggests pretty strongly that red and purple state politicians see it differently.