Some people saw it for what it was right away. Most of them left Germany as that was the only workable option. That feeling of recognizing what is wrong, yet having no power to stop it, should seem very familiar. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere to go in 2024. So we laager in place.

Some people didn’t see it until the annexations. Some, the invasion of the Low Countries and France. Some, when Hitler attacked their powerful ally, Russia, Some, when the Allies entered Germany. And, yes, some didn’t get it until a gun was pointed in their face held by a man yelling in a language he or she didn’t understand.

“polite society” of elite legal academia (and thus the appellate judiciary) viewed this as crazy talk

I wonder if ignoring the 2A led them to eventually get lazy about standing up for other rights.

Unless you’re a right winger that supports the major left wing things like ACA and open borders, then you’re FAR RIGHT. This is the case throughout the West. McCain was far right when he was running for president. Later in life, the media accepted him as merely right wing because he supported Democrats. In France, you’re FAR RIGHT if you support the National Rally party because you’re for crazy, fringe things like borders, law and order, and not allowing immigrants to get preference in benefits over French citizens.

I used to listen to NPR. The change I noticed was they began pushing constant white on black racism/white supremacy theories after the 2016 election. I ditched it, along with CNN, after watching them lose their minds.

It was this evil tactic that the evil gun lobby used to manipulate the SCOTUS into rejecting the bump stock ban.
There’s even this new evil extremist org known as the FPC they informed listeners about. NPR says the FPC makes the NRA look moderate. I was like: Whaaaaa??!?!?!?!?

For decades, although polls showed the overwhelming majority of Americans believed the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own guns, “polite society” of elite legal academia (and thus the appellate judiciary) viewed this as crazy talk, not meriting even serious consideration and marking you as a nut if you even mentioned it. Most constitutional law textbooks either ignored the Second Amendment completely, or relegated it to a footnote dismissing it as mere window dressing.

It took a couple of groundbreaking legal articles in the 1980’s by Don Kates and especially by Sanford Levinson (both regarded as very serious scholars who could not be dismissed as kooks or NRA shills) to make discussing the issue respectable. Levinson’s article (The Embarrassing Second Amendment, published in the Yale Law Journal) really opened the floodgates, leading to the avalanche of 2A legal scholarship in the 1990’s that eventually led to Heller, then MacDonald, and finally Bruen.

The details (plus a bonus interview with Sanford Levinson the day after Bruen dropped) can be found here:

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/kates-and-levinson-a-post-bruen-look-at-the-roots-of-modern-second-amendment-scholarship/