Beto O’Rourke and the Democrat Presidential candidates talk about big splashy plans to confiscate or license guns and deny services to gun and ammunition manufacturers.  That is unlikely to happen.  What is more likely is a subtle, step by step non-legislative action that will ultimately lead to the nullification of the Second Amendment.  

Another retailer has joined the growing list of large shopping locations to ban open carry of firearms on their properties.  That may not seem earth shaking by itself but wait -- there’s more. 

Giant Eagle has joined Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Starbucks, Wendy’s, Target, and Wegman’s in requesting customers not to open carry a gun unless they are police officers.

Giant Eagle has 216 supermarkets, primarily in Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania and Ohio are among the 37 states that allow open carry in one form or another.

Virtually all responsible Second Amendment groups and gun clubs will advise against open carry unless you have a really compelling reason to do so.  It is seen by many as a provocative act and is viewed very negatively by law enforcement.  There seem to be no studies that establish that it enhances personal security and, more often, can lead to dangerous confrontation. 

All that being said, in both Pennsylvania and Ohio, citizens do have a right to openly carry a gun as long as that person is a law-abiding citizen and may otherwise own a firearm.  It may be offensive to some but it is still legal to carry.

Anti-gun advocates have realized that there is little political will to attempt to encroach on the Second Amendment legislatively and risk the inevitable Constitutional challenges so they are trying a back door consumer side approach.  If they can’t confiscate guns, might they make them unusable?  To wit.

The problem is that open carry is not the only issue involving guns that is in play. It has been accompanied by a number of other non-legislative anti-gun initiatives. Several big retailers (Dick’s for example) stopped selling scary looking black guns -- you know, the kind the media likes to call "assault weapons," some time ago.  Then Dick’s stopped selling guns altogether at 125 stores in March of this year.  Walmart has stopped selling handguns in Alaska, handgun ammunition and ammunition for “assault rifles,” (that would be .223 cal. and 5.56 mm), in all its stores. It should be noted that these two types of ammo are used in a lot of different rifles, most of which don’t look like assault rifles.  A few stores, even big ones, not selling .223 and 5.56 will do nothing to mitigate any perceived gun violence and they must know this. 

What if a lot of big retailers, maybe all of them, stop selling ammo altogether and all of the sudden it gets difficult and expensive to find ammo to go to your favorite range?  Pretty soon, you might have a gun but no ammo to shoot.  Then, what if, over time, fewer and fewer stores sold guns?  It’s their choice. 

Okay -- back to the open-carry situation.  When the general populace gets conditioned to more and more stores, and then other public places, banning open carry, even if few people open carry, the anti-gunners then move on to ban concealed carry in those same places and metal detectors will begin to appear.  If you can’t carry in stores, where people spend a lot of their time, how long will it be before a lot of people start leaving the gun they now have no ammo to shoot at home?  Not all gun owners and even concealed-carry people are diehard zealots.  A lot are lukewarm and it wouldn’t take a lot to just leave their gun home and not brave the hassle.  Guns are effectively “off the street” without confiscation.

Might this be the start of a long slow “boil the frog” process of weaning the public off the exercise of their Second Amendment rights?  Think that is far-fetched?  Incrementalism is the hallmark of liberal activists.  The rabid abortionists started by changing terminology from abortion to “women’s health” and then progressed from first- term abortion to if the mother’s life were in danger to the current abortion for convenience and post birth infanticide.  The current lunacy of a hundred gender expressions started with redefining homosexual as "gay" and then normalizing "gay" as just the guy next door and removing it from the psychiatric diagnostic manual.  Then it moved on to making it a hate crime to speak against homosexuality, gay, transgender or anything else.  Now one must worship transgenderism.

The Second Amendment is under the same type of incremental assault.  Stores ban open carry and then concealed carry.  Then then stop selling guns and ammo.  Then it’s okay to ban assault rifles by not selling them and then maybe by law. How about any other type of gun next?  As we speak, the Democrats are floating a ban on semi-automatic guns.  Think about what that covers.  That’s just a trial balloon, because stores will stop selling them along with other guns.  As the number of guns in existence shrinks, Red Flag laws slowly cover more and more people until “in the interest of public safety” no one may own a gun.  At this point, gun buybacks or similar programs become more possible.  Then what do we have?  The Second Amendment has been de facto nullified and America has been partially disarmed.  How big a step would it be, under some future leftist administration, to actually scrap the Second Amendment?  At that point it is open season on the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.  When these fall, there is no need for the rest of our Constitution as we will be living in a totalitarian society.  Maybe Second Amendment nullification all starts with not being able to open carry at your local Giant Eagle.