In the past, the gun control strategy relied on prior licensing requirements (gradually struck down) and technical restrictions (also gradually abandoned as pointless). Their current strategy is far more insidious: removal of access for new shooters (I-594) and lifetime prohibition on gun ownership for unrelated criminal offenses and, more Soviet-like, under completely unrelated medical pretexts.
That last direction is of great relevance to the population at large. As American public ages overall and the privacy of medical records from the government prying approaches zero, it exposes everyone to confiscation. Sometimes the confiscation is administrative, in the form of a mandate, but more often it is violent and effected with police raids. The arbitrary nature of the excuses is designed to foster what psychologists term “learned helplessness”, where the semi-random outcome is divorced from personal conduct. The intended effect is to rob a few of their guns and to drive the majority into stigmatized social hiding, making it difficult and scary to share the ideology of self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is also attacked by FDA, department of education and many other Federal agencies.
The most offensive aspect of the drive to impose lifetime legal disabilities is that a person prosecuted in New York would still be prohibited from possession of firearms upon moving to Texas, and even if the New York law is later reversed. That’s like giving full faith and credence to Nazi laws prohibiting Jews from owning guns even when the Jews move to America after 1945!
The solution, at this stage, is educating friends and neighbors about these trends. The Federal attempts to grab full control of the medical field in combination with the emphasis of certain states on misusing medical records should be enough to scare logically thinking people into resisting both.
PS: By coincidence, another article on the same topic was posted last night.