Listening to the nine Democrats running for president participating in Wednesday’s “gun violence forum” sponsored by the gun control groups March For Our Lives and Giffords, the biggest gun problem facing the country today is the fact that the NRA exists.
The second biggest problem is that we have a large number of law-abiding gun owners.
And rounding out the top three “gun violence problems” are America’s law enforcement officers who, according to the assembled candidates, seem to be at least largely — if not entirely — racist as a group, as well as bullies and bad guys who subject young men of color to harassment and violence on a regular basis.
Ironically, these Democrats argue that the answer to their first two problems is to increase the power and authority of third. Gun control means government control, and under the sweeping gun bans and laws proposed by everyone from Joe Biden to Andrew Yang, the federal government would have the power to imprison tens of millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans for non-violent, possessory firearms offenses.
Not only did these 2020 candidates display an abject contempt for a constitutionally protected right, we learned many of them want to replace the War on Drugs with a War on Guns. They might not admit it, or even realize it, but that’s precisely where their policies would take us.
Take gun licensing. A number of candidates announced their support for the idea of a national gun license, while former vice president Joe Biden wants the federal government to incentivize states to pass their own licensing laws. As bad as a national gun license is, Biden’s idea of 50 states passing their own licensing laws is perhaps even worse.
As Dr. Cassandra Crifasi, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told German Lopez of Vox regarding Massachusetts’ arduous gun licensing laws, “The end impact is you decrease gun ownership overall. Lots of folks think, ‘Well, it’s probably not worth going through all these hoops to buy firearms, so I’m not going to buy one.’ And then you have fewer firearms around, and less exposure.”
Actually, you don’t have fewer firearms around. You just have fewer licensed gun owners. In New York City, Emily Bazelon of Slate recently spent several months attending the Brooklyn Gun Court and found that many of the young black men facing a minimum of 3½ years for merely possessing a gun without a state license had no prior felony convictions.
“Here’s what predicted who ended up on the benches in gun court: race and age,” she writes. “Black people are less likely to own guns than white people, but the defendants in gun court were almost all black teenagers and young men. An initiative that sounded like a targeted attack on America’s gun problem looked up close more like stop-and-frisk or the war on drugs — one more way to round up young black men.”
The closest the Democrats in Las Vegas came to acknowledging this was in proclaiming the systemic injustice perpetrated against young men of color by the criminal justice system, most notably street cops. Yet there was no discussion, either from the gun control advocates asking questions nor the politicians answering them, about whether putting new gun control laws on the books can or will serve as new tools for harassment by law enforcement. Instead, there was just happy talk about “fixing” the racism endemic in the criminal justice system, while also tossing a dozen or so new federal felonies onto the statutes.
The candidates shared quite a few ideas about gun control, almost all of them either unconstitutional, unenforceable or ineffective. Another commonality is that most of their proposals treat the 2nd Amendment as a non-entity — mere words on a piece of paper — rather than a fundamental constitutional right.
And despite the fact that the gun forum lasted six hours, the candidates still managed to leave many questions unanswered: What happens if you violate Biden’s plan of banning so-called assault weapons and “large capacity magazines,” with current owners having the option of either registering their firearms and magazines under the National Firearms Act or turning them into the government in exchange for some cash? Do you go to prison? Do you pay a fine?
Also, it seems kind of silly to talk about what a moral imperative it is to take these “battlefield weapons of war off the streets,” and then only fine someone after you catch them with one. But that’s actually Beto O’Rourke’s proposal. He’s called for mandatory gun buybacks and is trying to avoid the uncomfortable fact that many Americans would never comply with his law and would face federal prison.
Several of the 2020 Democrats have proposed similar mandatory buybacks, but how do they intend to pay for their compensated confiscation of semi-automatic rifles and 17-round magazines? None of them have said, though a campaign advisor did tell Axios that Biden’s plan would pay for it by ensuring that the ultra-wealthy and corporations “pay their fair share.” In other words, they have no idea.
Gun control advocates are more emboldened today than they’ve been since the 1990s, and the Democrats in Las Vegas were eager to embrace their agenda. Unfortunately, they have no real idea of how to execute or enforce this agenda, and they won’t acknowledge that a large swath of the population is going to #Resist as they’ve been taught by the Left.
As illegal immigration supporters have done in deep-blue communities with so-called “sanctuary cities,” hundreds of communities across the country have already declared themselves “2nd Amendment Sanctuaries.”
That number will grow exponentially if one of the nine candidates we heard from on Wednesday is elected — and signs their unconstitutional, anti-gun agenda into law.
