Friendly advice: You obviously know your stuff and you make really interesting points, but use of the incendiary and cartoonish term "gun grabbers" makes it hard to take you seriously.
You're conflating "this will never happen" with "there aren't people who want this to happen".
Calling every single ATF employee a "jack booted Nazi thug" is indeed unfair, wrong, and incendiary. Calling someone who wants to confiscate guns "a gun grabber" is not.
The problem is that platform being advanced by Obama and Biden has been authored well ahead of time by gun control organizations. Before you call me a conspiracy theorist, I'll state that this is not a conspiracy if they're out working in the open about it; nor is it wrong for a President to call interest groups for policy advice. The real problem is that these interest groups are actively advancing an agenda that goes far beyond "Assault Weapons" or what most Americans would be comfortable with.
These organizations don't say "we will go out and confiscate most guns", they say "let's ban dangerous weapons and have mandatory buybacks", but then "British National Party" doesn't call themselves "National Socialist British Worker's Party" (ditto for "Golden Dawn" in Greece, etc..)
tl;dr It's right to call this a gun-grabbing agenda, even if the Obama had campaigned on the premise of "I won't take your guns" and said that he thinks that "second amendment recognizes an individual right".
That was one massive investment by the Joyce Foundation that went spectacularly bad....
Reactions to bringing up any opposition to this most elsewhere was a fusillade of vitriol.
And he had quite an anti-gun record before the campaign; e.g. being a Joyce Foundation board member is about as hard core as you can get. From what I learned, hard stuff vs. what is claimed he said while at the University of Chicago Law School, I believe he would actually like to confiscate all civilian firearms.
But he's not like Clinton, he's not a cultural Baby Boomer, he's actually from Generation Jones like myself. So the culture wars that have consumed the US since the '60s aren't, I believe, a big driver for him, just something he'll use.
However, bottom line, if he wants to ban commonly used guns, which "assault weapons" most certainly are, e.g. per Dianne Feinstein prevent transfer so they must be surrendered upon death (and she's quite clear about desiring total confiscations), I can't see how "gun grabber" is seriously incorrect.
Also, I've been hearing about Obama's secret desire to confiscate guns for years. Do you have anything stronger than third-hand hearsay to back this up? (Honest question, no snark intended.)
But you really should look into the Joyce Foundation some more, they massively funded an effort to provide a legal foundation for the "collective right" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment; as I note here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5070792 that investment was a total loss, 9 out of 9 Supremes said individual right.
And while one might not be "in lock-step with that group or its members on every issue" it makes a statement when you take the highest position after Chairman of the Board in the nation's premier anti-gun funding foundation. And as a board member you're responsible for the oversight of donations, the foundation's spending strategy, it's hard to see how he could have been in that position without agreeing with e.g. it's position of nullifying the 2nd Amendment.
Would you be as sanguine if he'd been a board member of the Pioneer Fund (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund)? I met its future head Philippe Rushton when he first presented his work at a late 80's AAAS annual meeting, he appeared to be an honest albeit naive scientist, he didn't expect the firestorm that his research resulted in (roughly quoting: "for every criteria I can find, blacks and Orientals plot at the extremes with whites in the middle"). (I myself have no informed opinion on these topics, ask me about chemistry, guns, computers, etc., but not that.)
> now we have his actions as a President to judge
Again, so far these actions are nothing more than mainstream liberal boilerplate about background checks, "assault rifles", "cop-killer bullets", etc. While this could be the first salvo in an attempt to undo the 2nd Amendment entirely, it doesn't meet my burden of proof. It feels up there with Naomi Wolf's "You just wait, Cheney's gonna declare martial law any day now!" in 2007.
There are also serious implications to his claim of executive privilege in the DoJ's denying the Congress documents on Fast and Furious. Either that operation reached into his staff, or the claim is bogus.
Your statement that starts with "While this could be the first salvo in an attempt to undo the 2nd Amendment entirely..." is irrelevant about my defense of my assertion that he's a "gun grabber".
Although one should note how every time something does get passed, it's described by "gun grabbers" as a good first step.....
ADDED: The massive funding wasn't of the Heller case per se. It was of legal "research" to support a future case like it, they weren't willing to bet the Supremes would keep dodging the issue like they have since the manufactured Miller case in 1939.
My point is that there is clearly a policy distinction between what liberals are calling "common sense protections", and legislation to _proactively take every gun from every gun owner_. There is a spectrum of opinion wider than [x] gun-grabber [ ] non-gun-grabber, and I don't believe any opinions should be dismissed a priori. There are real arguments to be made in favor of gun regulation, even if those arguments are wrong; holding such opinions does not necessarily mean one is secretly in favor of repealing all gun rights.
Many politicians are openly on the record as wanting to outlaw all abortion, even when there's a danger to mother's health, and even in the case of rape or incest. However, they've missed a minor detail: 54% of Americans are female and they just lost an election over it.
Unfortunately, while I'm happy that they're starting to realize that "this shit won't fly" so to speak, I'm scared that this position has become tenable: when I first took an interest in politics (~1998) "pro-life" position was explicitly defined as "opposition to abortion _other than_ when the mother's health is at risk, or in the case of incest or rape". That simply was not up for debate (the big debates were about parental notification, third trimester abortion, etc...).
Quite frankly passage of the "Partial Birth Abortion" (which defined this in explicitly moralizing terms and likened a different procedure to infanticide, as well as excluded provisions for mother's health, rape/incest, et al) is what I personally think made this tenable. When the distinction between "abortion" and "ALMOST infanticide" has been made using a non-scientific criteria, the gates to encroachment have been opened.
Likewise, the difference between "a military weapon that doesn't belong in our home" and a "grandpa's hunting rifle" is purely cosmetic, you can start arguing that "grandpa's hunting rifle" doesn't belong in your home, either.
What is fairly clear is that organizations that came up with the term "assault weapon" and are pushing for them to be banned are explicitly and openly in favor of confiscation. of far more than "assault weapons".
"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here."
Those are very common and accurate words of art in the RKBA community; one of my objectives in writing mini-essays like the above is to expose others to our viewpoint and that includes the language we use.
All I see are people proposing regulations for the manufacture and sale of particular kinds of dangerous weapons. Nobody that I know of is trying to "grab" guns from people who obtained them legally. As far as I know, that has never happened in US history.
What do you think happened when Tammany Hall gangster (in this case I'm not repeating myself) Timothy Sullivan got New York's first gun control law passed in 1911, requiring a permit to even own a handgun? What do you think happened to the newer immigrants against who this was enforced?
I mean, it takes some serious effort to, per Gawker's list of from a couple of years ago, issue only 21,100 handgun possession permits for 8 million people. And what about Heller and MacDonald? Both D.C. and Chicago froze handgun possession after registering them, and the latter also required periodic re-registration (well, expect for that one time an Alderman forgot to do it).
Complete or nearly so bans on possession may not fit the precise meaning of "grabbing", but I think they're close enough.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
And were those NYC non-Irish owned than therefore banned handguns "grabbed" or not? The SKS situation: well, you could sell your's or move it out of state, but if you didn't they were subject to being "grabbed" along with you for a nice prison term.
Seems a little hypocritical to demand precision from one side and embrace fluidity of the language on the other.
We do this because it's 100% a political and legal term, and of course propaganda. One good definition coming from a politician's mouth would be "any scary looking gun I think I can get banned". If you expect the gun owning community to embrace it, well, you're already disappointed. And by definition it can't be a precise term, unless we're talking about "an assault weapon as defined by [this specific law]."
We talk about "assault rifles", but even then there's a lack of precision. The original Nazi StG 44 is one, but the Swiss StG 57 is a battle rifle, in fact, it's so heavy at 12.5 pounds that with its standard 24 round magazine it's just about a machine rifle. StG is for Sturmgewehr, literally storm rifle in German.
There's also a lack of precision in that many, including myself, call semi-auto versions of them assault rifles, even though by the strict definition they can't be since one of the points of using an intermediate power round is to allow (more) controllable full auto firing, military ones are "selective fire" (although there's a common trend to max that out at 3 round bursts for greater control and conserving ammo).
The extremes in the gun community for naming them run from the NSSF's "modern sporting rifle" (they're the lobbying etc. group for manufacturers, distributors, retailers and range operators) to just recently, when Obama's threatened executive actions were unspecified, "Regime Change Rifles" from about the most rabid without being bat-shit crazy* of the "3 percenters".
* I.e. about as rabid as RMS but less "crazy".
I feel like I've learned a lot from your contributions here.