Gun control is now a campaign issue after the horrific Umpqah Community College shooting claimed nine lives in Roseburg, Oregon. At the same time, police “reform” is also a pressing issue — even though these two measures, if enacted, would completely contradict one another.
Pretty much every popular figure on the Left has issued a call to put restrictions on gun ownership and to demilitarize the police. But, in order to get those dangerous guns off the street, liberals in power are going to need to give a lot of power and authority to those policemen.
Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton is (or at least trying to be) at the forefront of both efforts. Clinton has already promised that she will move heaven and earth to get “sensible” gun control laws on the books. She’s even willing to bypass Congress and implement such laws through executive decree. (RELATED: Clinton: I’ll Use Administrative Actions To Implement Gun Control Plan)
She also wants all police officers to wear body cameras and she has publicly criticized police brutality numerous times.
Her former boss, President Obama, believes local police should be federalized and report directly to the Department of Justice — putting officers under the control of left-leaning bureaucrats — in order to rectify the perceived injustices of law enforcement. (RELATED: Obama Unveils National Obamalaw Plan)
However, many on the Left would like Clinton and others to call for more drastic actions when it comes to guns. That’s why a lot of liberals have endorsed the plan they really want: gun confiscation. But they’ve discovered a nicer word for it: “mandatory gun buyback.”
Vox’s Dylan Matthews argued on Monday in a widely-shared article that an Australia-like gun ban is the only real, foolproof way to stop mass shootings. Matthews admits that it’d be “really, really hard” to do, but it’s worth trying because he believes it is the right thing to do.
While buyback makes it sound more voluntary, taking guns away from private citizens would still require an expansion of police powers — both due to the taking away part and the need for more police to compensate for citizens not being able to defend themselves. (In case you somehow believe guns never stop crime, please take a brief five minutes to review The Daily Caller’s vast archive of reports on armed citizens taking down crooks.)
However, the people demanding this police expansion are the same people who believe law enforcement is too militarized, too invasive and too authoritarian. And the only solution for gun violence is to have police become militarized, invasive and authoritarian against law-abiding owners of firearms.
There’s going to be a whole lot of people who are not going to give up their guns voluntarily, no matter how great of a deal the government is offering. Since this buyback would be mandatory, it’s highly probable that heavily-armed cops would be called on to invade people’s homes to enforce the mandatory part.
The liberal conundrum is that leftists don’t like big men with guns, yet that’s one of the underlying motivations for the drive to confiscate guns.
The gun-control proponents may say you don’t need guns when you have the police. However, the left wants to curtail police power and turn officers into glorified hall monitors.
That’s because the police are scary men (and women) who upset the wrong people.
But unless criminals magically disappear from America immediately upon the enactment of gun control and police reform, this left-wing fantasy looks like it will be a nightmare for law-and-order.
Especially when those folks who want a costly, invasive police state intervention believe that enforcing America’s immigration laws is an impossible task and a constructing a wall upon the U.S.-Mexico border is entirely unfeasible.
Remember, this is tens of millions of guns that the government would be trying to take out of circulation.
The fact is that the answer to all the left’s problems is state intervention, and that often requires big men with guns to carry out.
Left-wingers, in spite of their anti-authoritarian posturing, are willing to accept police state-like measures if those measures can be used against people don’t like. The Left just don’t want proven crime-fighting techniques, like stop-and-frisk, being used anymore if it disproportionately affects their constituents.
While the contradictory drive on gun and police control may make no sense, the whole purpose of both is about putting power in the hands of folks liberals trust. They don’t trust gun owners and they don’t trust beat cops, but they do have in the faith in the noble power of bureaucrats.
And that’s why the Left has no issue with a federalized police state to handle all of America’s problems.
