The Party That Cried “They’re Coming for Your Guns” Is Coming for Yours
For decades, Republicans have rallied their base with a familiar refrain: The Democrats are coming for your guns. It was the go-to scare line, meant to conjure images of federal agents prying rifles from the hands of law-abiding citizens. Yet today, it is not Democrats, but the Republican-led Department of Justice, openly weighing whether millions of transgender Americans should lose their Second Amendment rights simply because of who they are.
Republicans who once preached that constitutional freedoms must never be abridged are now hunting for creative ways to declare transgender people “mentally defective” in order to strip them of their firearms. They’re not proposing due-process-based restrictions, applied case by case after psychiatric evaluation. No, they’re considering a blanket ban on an entire category of people. The very tactic they warned Democrats would use to gut the Second Amendment, they are now embracing—so long as the target group is politically convenient to scapegoat.
Make no mistake: this isn’t about public safety. If it were, DOJ officials would be discussing measures proven to reduce gun violence—closing loopholes, strengthening background checks, improving red-flag laws. Instead, they are exploiting a tragedy in Minneapolis to roll out yet another culture-war attack on transgender Americans. Guns are simply the latest stage for their anti-trans agenda.
Legally, the effort is a farce. Federal law already bars individuals adjudicated by a court as mentally unfit from owning firearms. But that’s a due process standard applied individually, not a blanket ruling on the basis of identity. Trying to shoehorn gender dysphoria into “mental defectiveness” won’t just collapse under constitutional scrutiny—it reveals an administration willing to bulldoze both the Second and the Fourteenth Amendments in one stroke.
And here’s the bitter truth: Republicans weren’t wrong when they said “someone” is coming for your guns. They just lied about who.
It’s not Democrats raiding gun safes in middle America. It’s Republicans in power, cynically weaponizing the machinery of the state to strip rights from people they’ve decided don’t deserve them. Today it’s trans Americans. Tomorrow? The precedent they set could justify almost anything.
The right to bear arms was never meant to be parceled out according to party whims or cultural prejudice. If Republicans truly believed their own rhetoric, they’d recognize that a government powerful enough to take away someone else’s guns because of identity is powerful enough to take away yours.
That’s the danger staring us in the face. And it didn’t come from the left.
