The goal of gun rights advocates is to allow individuals the right to own and carry firearms. That seems clear, even if it results in such questionable policies as allowing convicted felons or those who are a danger to themselves or others because of mental illness.
One of the immediate objective of many gun control efforts is to keep guns from those two groups. Other objectives are to prohibit the sale of “military style” rifles (as opposed to military rifles). A more long term or larger goal is to address “gun violence” (as opposed to violence per se, oddly). But simply “addressing” gun violence does not define a logical stopping point. According to the FBI, firearm-related homicides have fallen from 17,075 in 1993 to 10,869 in 2008 – more than a 40% decline. The number of nonfatal gun violence incidents has declined from 1,222,701 in 1993 down to 331,618 in 2008 before rising to 414,562 in 2011 – a two thirds decline.
As an example of the problem, Michael Bloomberg’s new effort Everytown for Gun Safety has an immediate goal of increasing the number of background checks performed prior to gun sales, with a special emphasis on gun shows and internet sales. But his prior support for “assault weapon” bans suggests that this is simply a first step in a longer run process. I don’t see any benchmarks or performance measures anywhere on the website, so it is impossible to know in advance when or how the group will accomplish its goals.
Some gun rights advocates believe that the long run goal is complete confiscation of guns. That seems overly paranoid to me, even though Dianne Feinsten has stated her desire to confiscate “assault weapons” and a New Jersey state senator expressing her wish for a bill that would “confiscate confiscate confiscate” . I think that gun control groups would be more successful if they were upfront about their long run goals and included benchmarks and performance measures in their public statements. That would allow gun rights groups some measure of comfort that background checks are not simply the first step towards confiscation.
JohnSmith223 
I thought I had left a comment about this before, but must have just composed it in my own mind. You touch on such an important topic here. I think the advocates of “common sense” gun laws are indeed harmed because slippery-slope counterarguments are not simply fabricated out of nothing. Every day those opposed to more gun regulation can wake up to find evidence for the slippery slope. Today they might point to the recent NJ legislative committee voting to further restrict rifle capacity in a way that would ban the Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle and its 14 round tubular magazine. I’ve been meaning to start an ongoing post on my blog that collects statements by gun control advocates to the effect that they would ban guns completely if they could. I think the post would be quite lengthy with people for whom that is the end game.
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You could crowd-source it through http://reddit.com/r/guns or http://reddit.com/r/gunpolitics. There is already a crowdsource for the defensive use of guns: http://www.reddit.com/r/dgu .
If you have a research grant, you could use the Mechanical Turk to hire people to locate quotes for you:
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
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Reblogged this on Gun Culture 2.0 and commented:
I think the end game for many advocates of gun control is complete or near complete bans on firearms, with confiscation to follow. See England, Australia, Japan. This obviously makes the idea of compromising on common sense gun laws more difficult. For example, is the law moving its way through the NJ legislature currently that would ban the Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle (over 10 million made and in continuous production since 1960) “common sense” or just plain overzealous?
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Reblogged this on Brittius.com.
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