When a teenager reacts to a new curfew accusing parents of being “Nazi dictators,” parents smile at the comparison. Sometimes kids have a hyperbolic way of arguing that reflects their desperation to have it their way. That same desperate voice comes from many gun rights activists. But on Wednesday the parents, uh rather the U.S. Senate, caved on the curfew, uh rather the background checks for gun buyers.

Every law passed in this land could be defeated if legislators listened to arguments about extreme outcomes, the so-called “slippery slope.”  Background checks lead to a gun registry. A gun registry leads to confiscation. Confiscation leads to law-abiding citizens being attacked in their own homes. Suddenly the mere screening of gun buyers has created a reign of terror in America, with innocent citizens threatened.  Why aren’t we smiling at these nightmare scenarios, instead of taking them seriously?

Somehow the scenario of millions of desperate gun owners sitting at home, ready to blow away anyone who touches their weapons scares me more than background checks.  Certainly there are plenty of gun owners who do not stay up at night worrying about someone coming to their house to take their weapons, and many of those pressed for background checks this past month. But there are apparently too many who live with their guns cocked and ready for action, those who shoot first and ask questions later.

In fact, background checks would probably allow most of the hair-trigger gun owners to keep their guns at the ready to defend their rights or perceived intrusion on their rights.  They will still have the power to intimidate anyone who suggests they are the least bit paranoid. They still have the right to threaten their elected representatives with loss of funding or support.  Background checks would not change any of that.

Extreme defensiveness and unwillingness to compromise are not the hallmarks of survival in this country. Notice the fate of Prohibition, which gripped our country for a less than a decade.  Learn a lesson from the labor movement, which became too greedy in the latter twentieth century.  Or watch what happens to politicians who have fought immigration reform in the twenty-first century. Those who “evolved” lived to fight another battle.  Those who made a Constitutional issue over the slightest gesture of reform have become irrelevant.

So today a desperate minority has been allowed to make the rules or rather, to dismiss the rules.  But adult restraint is coming, and those who shout for their rights, will soon be grounded or at least put on a curfew. Because shouting “Nazi dictator” does not make it so.