“You’re either with us 100 percent,” a gun nut told me, “or you’re against us. There’s no in between.”

Well, jeez. In spite of a long history of supporting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens to own, use and display firearms as they wish, I now find myself kicked out of the club. All that marching in lockstep with the National Rifle Association and the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine in support of issues like carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, making it legal for employees to have concealed weapons in their vehicles while at work, and allowing the continued sale of semi-automatic weapons and guns with large magazines went for naught. I’ve been branded as an anti-gun, authoritarian leftist who buys fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood, harbors illegal immigrants in his basement and refuses to stand up and remove his cap during the singing of “God Bless America” at baseball games.

At least the part about “God Bless America” is true.

My great transgression against the holy creed of gun ownership is that I support the proposed referendum calling for mandatory background checks on buyers at gun shows and in private sales. This, I’ve been told, is heresy of the highest order. Background checks to screen out those with criminal records or serious mental health issues are already mandatory for anyone purchasing guns from federally licensed dealers. But opponents say if the practice was expanded to non-licensed sellers at shows or those who advertise in “Uncle Henry’s” or on Craigslist, the very foundation of our constitutional form of government would crumble faster than Millinocket’s economy.

According to my former allies, this seemingly innocuous requirement, which has been in place for years at gun shops without any noticeable effect on Americans’ right to keep and bear arms, is just camouflage for the anti-gun lobby’s real agenda: to create a federal registry of firearms. Once that’s in place, it will be child’s play for blue-helmeted troops in black helicopters to descend on every neighborhood in the nation and seize all the weapons. After that, the United Nations will be free to implement Agenda 21, and it won’t even be legal to play “God Bless America” at ball games.

“This is part of a national agenda,” David Trahan of the Sportsman’s Alliance told the Portland Press Herald.

“Mandating universal background checks would, in other words, basically ban all private gun sales,” wrote Republican Party activist Jim Fossel in a column in the Bangor Daily News. “It would be like requiring you to go to a dealership to sell your car.”

Actually, selling your car (or your house or your liquor or lots of other stuff) is currently a lot more complicated than selling your gun, and that would still be true if this initiative becomes law. Maybe we need a referendum to correct that. As for private sales being banned, that’s hyperbole. Individuals buying firearms from other individuals would have to go to a licensed gun shop and request a background check. Other than that, everything would stay just the way it is now.

To be fair, supporters of universal scrutiny of all gun sales are only slightly less brain-scrambled in their claims than their opponents. According to a press release from The Maine Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense Fund (motto: Short Names Are For Losers), domestic violence expert Laurie Fogelman claimed, “In the states that have closed this loophole, 46 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners. This initiative will give Maine the chance to join the group of states where women are safer from gun violence.”

Maine already has one of the lowest murder rates in the country, and it’s extremely unlikely this measure (or any other that doesn’t include a restraining order requiring “intimate partners” to never come within rifle range of each other) would eliminate nearly half the killings associated with domestic violence. But it would probably save a few lives each year, so it seems worth the minor inconvenience necessary to screen out a handful of felons and nutjobs.

I’ll sign this petition if I get the chance, even though it’s going to cost me my membership in the Society For The Promotion Of God, Guns and Glory. But I was already on probation, anyway, after some of my ex-pals noticed I wasn’t standing for “God Bless America,” but I did get up to stretch during “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.”

With them, it’s all or nothing.

If you stand for GBA, but can’t stand me, put your objections in an email to aldiamon@herniahill.net.