I disagree with this. The best case is what you call the worst case.
We have gone through this before. Gun control was mainstream in much of the country a half-century ago, around the same time the death penalty was abolished and the EPA instituted. This was a modern Western social democracy at one point.
And then the madmen trashed it.
The gun rights movement is just another aspect of the anti-modernity movement that Wm. F. Buckley knit together, right alongside banning birth control, opposing socialized medicine, putting “inferior Negroes” to death on spurious grounds, gutting environmental law, and opposing social democracy generally. The gun nuts are the same people as the anti-contraception maniacs, the white supremacists, the “free-marketers,” and the anti-environmentalist backlash.
The previous generation assumed that progress would proceed peaceably. But the best long-term way to defeat the rabid right in the USA’s federal democratic system is to defeat them militarily. This is what the abolitionists had to do. It is what we or our children will have to do. And time is short. The madmen still have their hands on the tiller and will not permit us to stop the destruction of our economy by climate change.
They have already set their terms, long ago. Cold dead hands. I do not ask those terms to change. I ask only an acceptance of those terms from those of us who made the mistake of thinking this reform–any reform–could stand without being enforced by bloodiness worthy of U.S. Grant and Wm. Tecumseh Sherman.