Free at last, free at last!!

The most idiotic, symbolic, and downright malicious federal law ever enacted bit the dust today. The "Assault Weapons Ban" is officially history.

Good riddance, I say. But based on the hyperventilating of the anti-gunners, you'd think that gun dealers were just given the green light to sell machine guns to kindergarteners. They are sincere in their distress, since the AW ban embodied everything that gun-grabbers like in a law: It was a vague, easily mistinterpreted, largely symbolic, stepping stone to bigger and better things.

For anyone who has actually read and understood the law, this hand-wringing is downright hilarious. There will not be a "flood" of "assault weapons" on the street because the law didn't remove any weapons in the first place. Gun manufacturers were able to sell virtually identical knock-offs of banned weapons by simply removing a bayonet stud here or a flash suppressor there. The only effect of the law was to spur panic buying that made real assault weapons more valuable and more in demand.

For gun owners, the demise of the law is more than being able to purchase an AR-15 with a flash suppressor. It's a big first step in the effort to restore the Second Amendment. For the first time in the past 70 years, a Federal gun control law has been repealed in its entirety -- not just partially repealed, not just partially overturned, not just amended, but completely eliminated. Gone. Dead. Hopefully, never to return.

For the first time since 1934, the ever-tightening ratchet of gun control has been reversed. Not just stopped, not just slowed down, but reversed. Hopefully, during the reversal process its gears have been stripped and the mechanism broken. Now it will turn both ways with equal ease.

Gun owners can't simply rest on their laurels and congratulate themselves as they walk out of the gun store with a new semi-auto AK. This must be a beginning, not an end. We have won a major battle, but the war goes on.