In all of the decades that the modern version of the contentious debate in America over guns, freedom, and the Second Amendment has been going on, the gun-control advocates have repeatedly assured gun owners of one thing: they don’t want to take our guns away from us.
My, what a difference one presidential primary full of unabashed Democratic statists makes.
After years of being told that we are paranoid for saying that the anti-gun Left wants to confiscate our weapons, the anti-gun Left is letting us know in no uncertain terms that they want to confiscate our weapons.
Loudest among them is Robert Francis “Horse Mouth” O’Rourke who, seeing his relevance as a candidate dwindling by the hour, has decided to go all-in on making a pitch for being America’s gun-grabber-in-chief:
Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15.
Buy your shirt now: https://t.co/kEJxoLvfH5 pic.twitter.com/KKpAKX4IL8
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 13, 2019
This Soviet turn marks a departure for Beto in a couple of ways.
Last year, when the only constituency he was trying to woo consisted of residents of the great state of Texas, O’Rourke was still paying lip service to being a supporter of legal gun owners.
So much for that.
As recently as a few weeks ago, Beto was talking about a federal “buy-back” of AR-15s. Yes, that’s euphemistic garbage — the government can’t buy back something it never owned in the first place. It’s semantic whitewashing of what the program really would be: a huge first step to federal gun confiscation.
As of Friday, Cory Booker was still pretending a bit, but tipping the Democrats’ hands nonetheless:
.@CoryBooker on banning assault weapons: "Yeah, it’s mandatory. You have to set up a system to pull them off. But this idea, this imagery that the fearmongers and demagogues try to say of somehow armed police officers showing up & confiscating weapons, that’s the fear mongering." pic.twitter.com/KAw8gO8d6w
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 13, 2019
So…it’s a mandatory surrendering of the guns to the federal government that will no doubt be unpopular with 99.9999999999% of the people it targets and we’re supposed to believe that there will be no heavy-handed enforcement by the feds.
Has this clown even met the Internal Revenue Service?
Kamala Harris got out in front of everything earlier in the year when she promised that she would almost immediately become an executive-action nightmare on gun control if Congress didn’t give her what she wanted.
While the Democrats keep referring to the AR-15 specifically, they also repeatedly use the phrase “weapons of war,” which puts the slippery in “slippery slope.”
“Weapons of war” is a catch-all that can also refer to sidearms, knives, and anything else ever used in a battle. They used to use rocks back in the catapult days, you know.
They naturally dismiss this idea as just more paranoia, even as they work to prove that none of us are actually paranoid.
Even — let’s just pretend for a moment — if they were sincere and didn’t intend to come after all firearms, when has the federal government ever shown restraint in matters like this? Give the bureaucratic behemoth an inch and it will immediately seek ways to take every mile on Earth.
The obvious takeaway from all of this is that we were right all along about the Democrats’ intentions, which provides a perfect example for future debates when they’re pretending to be anything other than what they truly are: Soviet-esque control-freak statists.
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PJ Media Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.”
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