"Off the Grid"

This post inspired by Tam's brilliant dissection of the recent study that put the USA at the top of the list for heavily armed citizens.

Favorite quote:

This is why gun confiscation schemes are always so funny. Not only do we not know where they all are, we have no idea how many to look for. I hate to break it to the more idealistic folks that think some kind of magic complete gun ban would somehow solve anything, but this genie is well and truly out of the bottle. You might as well try rounding up sand.

Go RTWT. But please come back, as I've derived inspiration from comments I left, and didn't want to sully Tam's bandwidth with my inane utterings...

So... "Off the Grid" - it's can be used to indicate self-sustained households (i.e. well water, septic, independent power generation, etc) that could (theoretically) be off "Big Brother"s radar. I've appropriated the term vis á vis firearms to cover guns that are legally owned, yet "off the books". These are firearms with no records, no 4473 tracing them to current owner. There are many ways this can happen legally, and I'll not detail them here.

I had commented on Tam's post thusly:

Call me paranoid, but I wouldn't want to talk publicly about guns I had that were off the radar.

I had intended it to be a general warning, not an admonition to Tam (sorry 'bout that!). I don't trust the idiots/fascists in power (or seeking power) any further than I can throw the whole lot of 'em; I certainly don't want them getting any ideas about privately-owned firearms. We've already seen, via the "gun show loophole" bullshit, how they corrupt, twist and otherwise bend a perfectly legal avenue (private sales of firearms just like any other inanimate object) into something sinister and eeevil.

The last thing I want is for some nanny-statist Big Brother fuckwad to get a hair across his/her ass about guns no one knows about. Hell, the headlines practically write themselves; it seems like every year or so we hear of some widow trying to dispose of her late WWII vet husband's bring-backs (which are most certainly "off the grid" weapons) - what's to keep the Brady Bozos from drawing up press releases about "weapons of war owned by private civilians with no accountability" or some other twisted bullshit.

The truth doesn't matter to these people; hell, in the vast majority of their reports they have to cherry-pick data or outright lie ("43 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder if you have a gun in your home", frex). I don't want to see some massive pogrom ginned up from an anti-2A administration (Hillary!, Obamarama, call your respective orifices).

And then it truly infuriated me. Here I am, concerned about giving the .gov ideas, when we've got the Constitution clearly on our side. SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. Where the fuck did the wheels start coming off the bus??? (My answer: Start with the racist Jim Crow laws that forbade freed slaves from owning firearms and move forward from there. NFA 1934. GCA 1968. FOPA 1986. AWB. The camel's whole freakin' front end is in the tent now...)

Gah. I'm off to the range.