Gun owners in America have had a bout of good news over the past year. A quick roundup for people who have been out of the loop:
The NFA taxes for suppressors, short-barrel rifles and short-barrel shotguns went down from $200 to $0 on January 1st, 2026.
Then in August a Federal court ruled that the entire registration process is now unconstitutional because the NFA's powers rested on taxation. No tax means no registration.
3 days ago, on October 9, 2026, the ATF publicly declared they would stop enforcing the NFA when it came to suppressors, SBRs, SBSs, and AOWs (“any other weapons'“). You can now buy or make these without bothering with the NFA if you live in one of the free states that doesn’t have its own NFA statute. (Key detail: they said they’d stop “enforcing” it. Not that the NFA is repealed.)
FRTs, or forced-reset triggers, are now mostly legal. Opinions vary on whether only specific models, or all of them are legal. But the bottom line is you can now purchase a trigger that makes your gun fire very fast, approaching full-auto speeds, without it being technically designated full-auto.
On the one hand, these are all improvements. Civilians can now possess firearms that are essentially on par with what the military has had access to for decades.
Laying the Trap
But I think something else is going on here. I don’t think the government has decided to suddenly reverse a century of gun control. Note that most of these changes are due to court injunctions and decisions by the ATF to no longer enforce certain laws. The laws themselves have not changed.
All it takes is for the ATF director to change and they can go back on their previous decisions. They’ve done this many times before, flip-flopping on pistol braces as just one example.
Democrats will likely win the mid-terms since Trump has alienated most of his supporters by breaking major campaign promises, starting wars, and causing financial hardship with fuel prices and import tariffs.
Polymarket has millions staked on the Democrats winning by a massive sweep, at 62% odds. As of the time of this writing, A Republican sweep is set to only 9%.
They’ll probably also win in 2028 after another 2 years of Trump wars and inflation destroys what remains of the U.S. economy.
Democrats will then be taking over an administration that has spent the past 4 years setting a precedent by giving ICE more and more power to detain without due process, essentially kidnapping people on the streets and putting them in concentration camps.
Regardless of your views on immigration, the way in which this enforcement is happening will be used again for something else.
Meanwhile the ATF has spent the past few decades collecting records. It now has a searchable database with over 1.4 billion records. Technically, this is unconstitutional, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping them.
A few days ago I wrote about how police departments across the country have been militarizing.
My prediction? When the administration switches hands, gun owners will be the next target. Why? Does the government really need to confiscate guns when it already has control of the central bank, the world’s largest military force, and Americans show no signs of rebellion despite worsening conditions?
No. They could maintain the status quo all the way till the American empire runs out of money and collapses, and gun owners will likely never do anything about it. Why would they? We have endless entertainment, air conditioning, and most people have too much to lose.
Nor do I think an open rebellion would be effective anyway - I think the proper solution is to exit the system and build alternatives. Wait out the system as it collapses under its own weight and be there to help rebuild the alternative.
Scapegoats
So why even attempt to confiscate guns?
Because collapsing empires need distractions and they need scapegoats. Someone has to be the bad guy they can blame when people are suffering.
Governments are very good at one thing: violence. If you protest peacefully by planting a garden and slowly exit the system, they have no idea what to do with you. If you go out on the streets and protest with violence, they know exactly how to deal with you.
As inflation continues to erode people’s purchasing power, a confrontation with gun owners would give politicians a convenient way to change the subject. People demanding answers about their declining standard of living could instead be told that the country is under threat from armed extremists, and that restoring order requires more federal power.
In that scenario, confiscation wouldn’t have to succeed to serve its purpose. It would only have to provoke enough resistance to justify the next crackdown.
That’s where I think this could turn into a civil war. Millions of people could find that something they bought openly, while the government told them it was permissible, now makes them a criminal. Some would comply. Others would refuse. If that refusal were met with armed raids, I’d expect some of those encounters to end in bloodshed.
Each deadly encounter could bring more people into the conflict and become the justification for more aggressive enforcement. Some states have already taken a stance against the ATF and created so-called 2nd amendment sanctuaries.
If local communities and officials began actively resisting federal enforcement, the conflict could spread well beyond the people who owned the newly prohibited weapons. People who had no intention of rebelling could find themselves drawn into it after a friend or neighbor was killed.
Hopefully I’m wrong. Maybe existing owners will be grandfathered in when the rules flip the other way. But I think there’s a very good chance a future Democratic administration criminalizes firearms people acquired under today’s rules and begins confiscations.
Regardless of whether my prediction comes true, your best bet is to focus on what you can do. Focus on improving your own life. Build up your health, your community relationships, and your supplies. Exit the system and build alternatives, while you can do it peacefully and supply chains are robust.
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The world’s largest military force? Yeah…not so much.
Biggest budget? Maybe, we can only guess at China’s spending.
P.S. they are not coming for your guns. Stop being afraid.