“Where does anyone get the whacky idea that requiring background checks, age limits, etc. is going to lead to the “government seizing all guns?” ”
I know that was rhetorical, but I’ll answer anyway: they’re getting that idea from the NRA propaganda machine. They have a finite list of arguments that are just restated over and over:
1) Criminals will just break the law anyway, so we should just have no laws
2) Dictators took away people guns in the past, therefore all gun regulation is at least a fraction of that
3) Allowing the government to define who is sane enough to own a gun would allow them to take away everyone’s guns
Obviously these arguments are all extremely weak, but they’ll keep using them into infinity. By the way, as for the “hunting” argument: very few people in the countryside actually participate in hunting. From my experience, maybe 1 in a hundred men hunted. And 0 percent of anyone in any civilized country depends on hunting to feed their family. It’s just a sport, and a cruel one at that; so, frankly if we inconvenience hunters with regulation, that would just make me even happier.