It is absurd to expect governments to descend gradually, step-by-step into barbarism - as if there was a train schedule to political hell and people could get off at any stop along the way.
Gun laws are an attempt to nationalize the right of self-defense. Politicians perennially react to the police's abject failure to prevent crime by trying to disarm law-abiding citizens. The worse government fails to control crime, the more the politicians want to restrict individuals' rights to defend themselves. But police protection in most places is typical government work - slow, inefficient, and unreliable.
To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.
The vision that the founding fathers had of rule of law and equality before the law and no one above the law, that is a very viable vision, but instead of that, we have quasi mob rule.