The gun rights movement’s foundational argument for forty years: registration leads to confiscation. The NRA has fought every attempt at a federal gun registry on exactly this basis. Know who has guns, and you can take them.
The DOJ just mandated registration in the loudest way possible. Americans are specifically forced to register guns based on birth sex, on federal purchase forms, under penalty of felony charges.
The Trump propagandists know how to twist the knife of oppression.
Whenever law-abiding gun owners’ constitutional rights are violated, the Trump Administration will fight back in defense of freedom and the Constitution.
Same announcement, same document.
Lose rights by claiming them.
The right formally exists. Exercising it is suicide, and therefore not a shared right; rather a self-incrimination test for a targeted population.
The twist is that actual threats to society were being pushed as grounds for disclosure or denial. Domestic violence, for example. Trump uses this logic to make gender a class of threat, only a short hop away from registering political view.
This principle has a history. The history is one of selective application for purposes of oppression.
In 1967, Black Panther Party members carried firearms to the California State Capitol—a straightforward exercise of Second Amendment rights identical to what white gun owners did routinely. The response was immediate: Governor Reagan signed the Mulford Act restricting open carry, with bipartisan legislative support and NRA endorsement. The constitutional principle didn’t change. Who counted as a rights-bearing citizen did.
Prohibition operated through the same logic. The Eighteenth Amendment nominally banned alcohol production for everyone. Enforcement told a different story. Black distillers were primary targets—the same people forced to learn the craft under slavery who might now build prosperity from that coerced expertise. German brewers, Italian winemakers, Irish and Mexican producers faced similar targeting. Connected saloons continued operating for the right clientele. The law existed not to eliminate alcohol but to determine who could legally build wealth from it.
Japanese internment followed the same pattern. California interned its Japanese-American population; Hawaii, actually attacked and with a far larger Japanese population, did not. The difference: California’s Japanese-American farmers had built successful agricultural operations. They returned from the camps to find their land seized, their businesses transferred to local white competitors who had called for their registration and incarceration. National security was an obviously bogus rationale, but white businessman knew they could smash and grab. Economic elimination was the function.
Black distillers were criminalized to prevent post-slavery prosperity. Japanese farmers were interned to transfer their land. Black gun owners were legislated into felony, by the NRA politicians, the moment they carried openly. Now Americans are being forced to choose between disarmament and federal registration intended to disarm them.
The constitutional language never changes. Who counts as a rights-bearing citizen does.
Take the DOJ’s stated principle seriously: constitutional violations justify armed defense. Apply it universally—to First Amendment violations, Fourth Amendment violations, due process violations currently occurring through federal enforcement actions. The principle cannot survive that application, which reveals its actual function: not legal doctrine but white nationalist signaling.
The quiet part of Reagan or Wilson is out loud under Trump. The DOJ has put in writing the unjust and unequal effects that always operated in practice. It’s the “again” part of MAGA.
The question is what happens when people marked for exclusion take the stated principle at face value.