If you’re a freedom-loving American with a deep reverence for the Constitution, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a gun owner or not. You already know that the Founders inserted the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights to ensure that, for all time, Americans would have the right to keep and bear arms. Whether they exercised that right – or not – was up to each American, but the Constitution guarantees that this bastion of liberty remained in force.
However, it seems that the Democrat candidates for President see things somewhat differently. Which – following the immutable Law of Unintended Consequences – could actually help Constitutional Conservative candidates for Congress in 2020.
Right up front, all the candidates support a wide variety of draconian gun control measures, including universal background checks, “assault weapon” bans and limitations on “high-capacity” magazines, along with denying the right to keep and bear arms – without due process – to people who they deem to have relatively few advocates in our society. Bans on “assault weapons” ranks high on some candidates’ platform – in the case of Senator Bernie Sanders (S-VT), he’s built his entire stance around his many votes to ban these rifles – which “look” military but are operationally no more intimidating or deadly than the semi-automatic deer rifles used by millions of hunters.
These knee-jerk “gun control” advocates overlook the fact that the most heinous mass murderers – such as the maniac who decimated an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas two years ago – had already violated numerous existing gun control laws before pulling the trigger. Ignored by its advocates as an “inconvenient truth,” a significant majority of mass-shooting murderers – including the shooter in Vegas – did pass their background checks. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough gun laws on the books. The problem is the spotty enforcement of the reasonable laws we do have.
However, beyond this near-universal anti-gun stand, many of the candidates have signed on to other gun confiscation – or steps leading to gun confiscation – actions. Let’s take a look at how these Democrat candidates stack up.
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) wants to require that all gun owners acquire a Federally-issued license before they could own a gun, let alone keep and bear it. While at the time he announced this position back in May, he stood alone among the Progressive, far-Left candidates. However, his action forced others to take a stand, and so far, these other candidates have jumped on Booker’s bandwagon:
• Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who never met a Federal regulation she didn’t like
• Former Obama Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Julian Castro
• South Bend Mayor and committed vegetarian Pete Buttigieg
• Former Congressman Beto O’Rourke of El Paso
But that is not the only plan afoot to drastically weaken the Second Amendment. In fact, the popular (among Democrat candidates) mandatory gun buy-back program is supported by a host of candidates. In this plan – which is proudly modeled on the confiscatory gun bans enacted in New Zealand and Australia – the Federal government would force gun owners to surrender their firearms. However, as a fig leaf to the idea that this is in fact confiscation, the government would “buy back” those guns from legal gun owners.
Of course, the government would set the buy-back price, and private citizens would have no hope of negotiating for a fair price. The plans start with the dreaded “assault weapons,” which are mechanically no different than a semi-automatic deer rifle or target rifle – but because they look “tactical,” they must be evil, worthy of being banned. Right? Apparently virtually all Democrat Presidential candidates agree that “assault weapons,” which are just deer rifles with military-looking cosmetics, must be banned. And that’s just the first step. If such a ban survives review by the Judiciary, we can expect the law to morph into a more exact replica of the universal gun-ban/gun-confiscation laws passed in Australia and New Zealand.
So who supports a mandatory buy-back gun confiscation law?
• Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been all over the board on gun policy, edging swiftly to the left with each change in position or legislative plan
• Senator Bernie Sanders (S-VT), the admitted Socialist, who wants to follow in the path of all previous socialist states, to confiscate citizens’ guns
• Former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, who calls gun buy-backs “good policy”
• Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), who has made gun control one of her highest priorities
• Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, who’s changed his gun stance several times during the campaign, always adopting more stringent violations of Americans right to keep and bear arms
A pattern has emerged among the twenty-some candidates for the Democrat nomination – it impacts gun control laws, but is also found surrounding other issues. First, one candidate will take a radical leftist or Socialist position, one that stretches the grounds of credulity. Then, ANTIFA and other extremist groups start pressuring the other candidates to “take a walk on the wild side,” and like good little soldiers, the Democrat candidates all fall into lock-step with the radicals. This can be seen in many issues, but nowhere more-so than in the evolving gun control positions of the various candidates.
This suggests that we have yet to see the most radical anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment positions – those have yet to emerge, but as the race heats up, and as far-left special interests and their fellow travelers, the pressure will increase on whomever becomes the Democrat nominee to adopt the most extreme positions possible.
How does this leftward lurch toward confiscatory gun control stack up as an electoral issue? Because it is certain to become a major debating point at the Presidential level, the gun grabbing issue will be seen as national, and therefore a reasonable issue, one open for debate, in each of the 435 Congressional campaigns in 2020.
Conservative candidates, especially those who openly support our Constitutional guarantees – including those enshrined in the Second Amendment – will be able to legitimately paint their opponents with the radically-extreme anti-gun positions adopted by the Democrat Party Platform, and the Democrat Candidate for President. In “fly-over” country, in districts where the Constitution is still respected, this could be a winning issue.