Democratic candidates gathered in Ohio to agree on how much they can’t stand lawful gun ownership, disagreeing only on who was the most deeply offended. Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (D-Texas) scuffled about whose furrowed brows over law-abiding gun ownership was more courageous, but that masked the slips on stage.
AR-15 = Terror
O’Rourke took the first question on guns out of the gate and ran straight to the far left. After rattling through gun control talking points to mischaracterize modern sporting rifles, like the AR-15, he took it a step further.
“Every single one of them is a potential instrument of terror,” he said.
Deductive reason concludes therefore, O’Rourke believes every law-abiding American who legally owns one is a terrorist. O’Rourke stuck to his pledge to confiscate more than 16 million semiautomatic rifles but waffled on how to do it. He said he expected Americans to follow the law but ignored the fact the murderers who committed the horrific acts ignored laws.
“We don’t go door to door to do anything in this country to enforce the law,” O’Rourke explained. “I expect Republicans, Democrats, gun-owners, non-gun-owners alike to respect and follow the law.”
In another attempted answer he said the rifles would only be confiscated when someone uses it in an unlawful manner, which is already illegal. He defaulted to saying police would be called in to enforce an unconstitutional gun grab.
“If they persist, they will be other consequences from law enforcement,” he concluded, without elaborating on those consequences or repercussions of forced disarmament, the very reason the Founding Fathers recognized the pre-existing right to keep and bear arms. This nation was literally founded on fighting back against a tyrannical government that sent armed forces to disarm Americans.
O’Rourke glossed over it earlier when even anti-gun MSNBC couldn’t fathom how mass confiscation would work. He said it’s easy, that, “… there would be a visit by law enforcement to recover that firearm…”
Warren’s Admission Slip
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said she wouldn’t forcibly confiscate AR-15s, instead she parroted the antigun Giffords’ position, saying she’d regulate them like machine guns. That’s where she stepped in it.
“I want to use the method we used, for example, with machine guns,” Warren said. “We registered them, we put in a huge penalty if you didn’t register them, and a huge tax on them, and then let people turn them in, and it got machine guns out of the hands of people.”
Until now, she’s conflated AR-15s with so-called “assault weapons.” She’s purposefully confused semiautomatic rifles, which fire one round for each trigger pull with automatic military rifles that fire continuously or in three-round bursts when the trigger is pulled. But, her idea to regulate them like machine guns was an admission she’s been lying all along.
There goes the “weapons of war” label.
Please, No More Truth
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) stumbled on to the truth without knowing it when she admonished her competitors for giving away the grand plan. CNN moderator Anderson Cooper threw her a softball about “mandatory buybacks” which is more correctly known as confiscation. Her answer was more like a foul-tip into the grass than a grand-slam into the bleachers.
“And I just don’t want to screw this up,” Klobuchar said. “When I’m president, I do want to bring in an assault weapon ban and I do want to put a limitation on magazines so what happened in Dayton, Ohio, will never happen again. But let’s not mess this up with this fight.”
That’s almost exactly what Sen. Cory Booker(D-N.J.) was saying when he scolded Buttigieg on social media for calling a confiscation exactly what it is.
“Calling buyback programs ‘confiscation’ is doing the NRA’s work for them, @PeteButtigieg— and they don’t need our help,” he tweeted.
Nate Madden of the Conservative Review noted that gussying up confiscation by labeling it as a “mandatory buyback” doesn’t really help.
“A mandatory buyback is when the government uses coercion to strip people of their once-legally-owned property, even if there is compensation offered in return.” Madden wrote.
Interestingly, the answers all focused on taking away guns from law-abiding Americans. Not one answer was given on getting guns out of the hands of criminals. We checked.
Larry Keane is Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.