>This is what scares me about the current attitude (nationally) towards gun control.
The current attitude stems from a desire for civility and public safety. Why would that scare you?
>The right to bear arms is a basic civil right, unambiguously encoded in the Bill of Rights alongside speech, assembly, religion, due process, etc.
It's not unambiguously encoded. If it were, there would not be entire debates over the meaning of the punctuation. People are unambiguous in their interpretations because of political ideology.
>Throughout history, taking away weapons has always been an early step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism and stripping the populous of their other rights.
Yes, but regulation is not confiscation, and the commonly held assumption on the part of many gun owners that the former inevitably leads to the latter (or is merely a knowing pretense towards the latter) is an uncharitable interpretation of the opposing point of view. Americans maintain the right to keep and bear arms even if that right doesn't extend to all possible arms under all possible circumstances.
"All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party." -- Mao Zedong"
The anti gun-control argument is, ironically, also that all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, but that power is liberty when the guns are pointed at the state and tyranny when the guns are pointed by the state. And yet anyone who simply doesn't want themselves or their children getting shot by psychopaths are considered unreasonable, because it's also liberty by proxy when those guns are pointed by the people at the people, and Americans are expected not only to tolerate and accept it, but be wary to question it.
Is it not possible that there is a reasonable middle ground between the NRA and Stalinist gulags?