The socialist government of Venezuela has just provided American gun owners with an excellent lesson in why it is of paramount importance never to let the government take our guns.  Back in 1998, after four decades of the Latin American variety of democracy, military leader Hugo Chávez, a moderate leftist, was elected president.  From that time until his death in 2013, he continued to take Venezuela further left, founding the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in 2007, which has remained the ruling party to the present, inexorably moving the country into a quagmire of socialist poverty.  Chávez died in 2013, but one of his last acts is now coming into full play in a way that provides our lesson.

In 2012, Chávez and PSUV began consolidating their hold on the Venezuelan people by banning guns in public places using the usual leftist excuse of reducing crime.  Since that first gun control measure, those in charge have incrementally, to the point of recent total confiscation, taken away gun ownership rights until the only legally owned firearms are those of the military, the police, and favored security organizations, and they can obtain those only through government sources.  The civilian populace of Socialist Venezuela has been effectively disarmed.

...unless your political views align with the socialist leadership, that is.  Chávez's handpicked strongman successor, Nicolas Maduro, has decided to hand out military-grade weaponry to those civilians who agree with him politically – that is, his hard-left socialist supporters.

From an excellent accounting at Washington Free Beacon:

"A gun for every militiaman!" Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro said to uniformed militia members outside the presidential palace, Fox News reported on Tuesday. The Bolivarian militias, created by Maduro's predecessor Hugo Chavez, already number in the hundreds of thousands and are being used to supplement the regime's armed forces. Maduro is boosting the number of armed supporters in hopes of keeping control over the country from what he labels "imperialist aggression."

Therein lies your lesson, American gun owners: the American left constantly pushes for more gun control, never satisfied, slowly chiseling away at our 2nd Amendment rights, even to the point that a President Hillary admittedly would have considered the Australian buyback form of voluntary gun confiscation.  With the American left moving ever more radically in that direction, who is to say that a future dedicated socialist president like Elizabeth Warren might not stack the Court and get the reading of the 2nd Amendment that the Democrats have long wanted: that the only legal guns in America, like Venezuela, are those in the hands of government?

And who's to say that an even more rabidly socialist successor to a President Warren might not decide that she feels her position threatened, like President Maduro, and decide to issue arms to her loyalists?  Thanks to our recent election victory, we are now enjoying a respite from liberal gun grabs and fears of a liberal-dominated Supreme Court.  However, as the Democrats have recently learned regarding national power, nothing is forever.