Tricky talk and political scheming the founders warned of

The founders specifically warned that Congress, backed by a standing army, might one day move to disarm the American people, leaving citizens toothless to oppose tyranny.

Are we witnessing the start of something the founders warned of?

Retired Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli is now among those campaigning for deeper layers of civilian gun control. At Time, Chiarelli writes he's now part of something called the Veterans Coalition for Common Sense:

Some of us are combat veterans. Some of us are gun owners. All of us were trained in the responsible use of firearms and to have respect for their incredible power. All of us swore an oath to defend our Constitution and to defend the homeland. And we all agree on this: our country is in the grips of a gun-violence crisis...

The policies we support—closing the loopholes in our background check system and prohibiting known and suspected terrorists from legally buying guns—are not controversial. In fact, we are not asking our leaders to do anything that is not supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans, including gun owners. We are simply asking them to use common sense to save lives.

The term common sense must resonate well with average folk and focus groups. That's probably why so many politicians use the term to accompany twisted words and bamboozling proposals that put our rights at risk.

Pretty damn bold. Chiarelli wraps himself in the Constitution while advocating infringement of both the Second Amendment and citizen rights to due process. The Constitution considers an accused person innocent until proven guilty. Chiarelli and his cohorts wish to begin infringing on citizens rights based on mere suspicions, some of which may not even risk to the level of triggering active law enforcement investigation.

The founders warned of guys like Chiarelli and his would-be rights-crushing cohorts.

Ever read Liberty or Empire by Patrick Henry? By some accounts, it's Henry's second most famous speech, saying in part:

The honorable gentleman who presides told us that, to prevent abuses in our government, we will assemble in convention, recall our delegated powers, and punish our servants for abusing the trust reposed in them. Oh, sir! we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? You read of a riot act in a country which is called one of the freest in the world, where a few neighbors can not assemble without the risk of being shot by a hired soldiery, the engines of despotism. We may see such an act in America.

Henry's speech was delivered in 1788 to the Virginia legislature testifying to his insistence that a Bill of Rights be included with ratification of the Constitution.

We're now seeing an orchestrated move by political elites to un-do the constitutional safeguards the founders put in place, and that those who push for the un-doing count on dumbed-down Americans who fail to see what's falsely touted as common sense by today's political class and their allies would have been labeled by the founders as steps toward tyranny.