WALSH: Calling Gun Confiscation A ‘Mandatory Buyback’ Is Like Calling Armed Robbery A ‘Compelled Donation’

By Matt Walsh

Democrats have ramped up their extremist anti-gun rhetoric in the wake of the mass shooting in Odessa, Texas over the weekend that left seven dead and dozens injured. Of course, as usual, the gun debate misses the point. The shooter on Saturday was a psychotic lunatic who previously failed a gun purchase background check, had called the FBI many times over the years to leave incoherent messages, and finally snapped after being fired from his job. It appears that this tragedy was entirely preventable, had already existing laws been followed and red flags been heeded.


Adding more laws on top of the mass of unfollowed or ineffective ones will not achieve anything. The shooter in Dayton, Ohio last month was known to keep a list of people he wanted to kill and rape. It should not have been necessary to take everyone's guns away in order to forbid that particular dangerous nutjob from obtaining a firearm. In the same way, a nationwide gun control initiative is not needed, and would not be the most effective means, to disarm a paranoid weirdo whose favorite hobby is rambling to the FBI's answering machine.

But Democrats are not interested in effective solutions. Hence former Vice President Joe Biden's call for a ban on magazines that "hold multiple bullets" — as opposed to magazines that contain just one bullet, I guess — and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke's (D-TX) proposal of a "buy back" program. Here's how the congressman explained this idea to reporters:

"Americans who own AR-15s, AK-47s, will have to sell them to the government. We’re not going to allow them to stay on our streets, to show up in our communities, to be used against us in our synagogues, our churches, our mosques, our Walmarts, our public places."



"Will have to sell them" is the operative phrase here. In an op-ed in USA Today a few weeks ago, O'Rourke called this a "mandatory buy back." Nobody loves euphemisms more than Democrats, and this is no exception. A mandatory buy back is just another name for confiscation. It's a bit like calling armed robbery a "compelled donation." The latter characterization wouldn't hold up in a court of law, and the "buy back" ruse shouldn't hold up in the court of public opinion.


First of all, where does the "back" in "buy back" come from? If you buy something back from someone, that means you are the one who originally owned, and then sold, the thing in question. But most American gun owners weren't given their firearms by the government. They bought the guns, fair and square, from private sellers. In a "buy back" scenario, the government would be "buying" what it never owned to begin with. There is no "back" in such an arrangement.

Second, there is no "buy," either. The word buy, by definition, means: To acquire possession, ownership, or rights to the use or services of by payment, especially money. In O'Rourke's system, the government would acquire possession of so-called "assault rifles" not by payment, but by legal decree. The money is just a symbolic consolation prize after the fact. If it was anything more than symbolic, the "seller" would have the power to negotiate the terms of the sale and ultimately pull out if an agreement can't be reached.

Third, these "buy back" transactions become an even bigger farce when you consider whose money is being exchanged. The only money the government has is what it takes from the taxpayer. During a "buy back," the state would be "buying" your guns, against your will, with the money it also took from you against your will. Imagine going to a flea market and trying to pay a vendor with the cash you stole from his wallet when he wasn't looking. That's what this is like, except at least the seller at the flea market has the right to decline your generous offer. Gun owners under an O'Rourke administration would have no such right. And if a seller does not have the ability to say no, then he's not selling. He's being robbed, plain and simple.

https://www.dailywire.com/news...y-buyback-matt-walsh

If they were serious about "buying" (they're not), they would offer extremely generous compensation that would prompt voluntary sales.

I'd imagine a $10,000/rifle price plus an equal amount in future tax credits would get many owners thinking about it.

A $50 Visa gift card isn't going to do it. Of course, they are perfectly willing to threaten prison if you don't like the deal.

^^^ MNSIG, David Harsanyi makes that same point here:

Dems Propose First Gun Grab Since Lexington And Concord

'Mandatory gun buyback' is a silly euphemism.

By David Harsanyi
September 4, 2019

The media should stop using absurdly lazy phrases like “mandatory gun buybacks.” Unless the politician they’re talking about is in the business of selling firearms, it’s impossible for him to “buy back” anything. No government official—not Joe Biden, not Beto O’Rourke, not any of the candidates who now support “buyback” programs—has ever sold firearms.

What Democrats propose can be more accurately described as “the first American gun confiscation effort since Lexington and Concord,” or some variation on that theme. Although tax dollars will be meted out in an effort to incentivize volunteers, the policy is to confiscate AR-15s, the vast majority of which have been legally purchased by Americans who have undergone background checks and never used a gun for a criminal purpose.

The “mandatory gun buyback” exemplifies the impracticality and absurdity of do-somethingism (although Biden’s proposal to ban “magazines that hold bullets”—so most guns—is also a contender!). Democrats want to turn millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals overnight for refusing to adhere to a law that retroactively transforms the exercise of a constitutional right into a crime.

And they do it without any evidence that it would curtail rare mass shootings or save lives.

While national confiscation would be unprecedented in American history, we already possess hard evidence that bans of assault rifles don’t alter gun violence trends. Gun homicides continued to drop steeply after an “assault weapons” ban expired in 2004. It’s also worth noting that in 2017, the last year of available FBI data, there was a near-historic low of 7,032 murders with handguns, and 403 by “rifles” of any kind, not only “assault weapons.”

To put that in perspective, there were 1,591 knife homicides during that same span, 467 people killed with blunt objects, and another 696 with fists and kicking. (Not every police department reports the type of gun used in homicides (3,096 of them), but it’s reasonable to believe that similar trends apply, since those murders took place in big cities where handguns are most prevalent.)

Although a number of Democrats now unequivocally support a “buyback,” no one has explained how the procedure will unfurl. What will the penalty be for ignoring the “buybacks”? Fines? Prison terms?

Will local police be tasked with opening case files on the 100 million homes of suspected gun owners who are armed with hundreds of millions of firearms, or will it be the FBI? Maybe Democrats will propose “paying back” family members and neighbors who snitch on gun owners? How else will they figure out who owns these AR-15s? There is no national tracking of sales.

Then again, many Democrats support “universal background checks,” which would necessitate a national database. So subsequent confiscations would be far easier, I suppose. (I can remember a time not very long ago when liberals accused a person of being a tin-foil-hatted nutter for merely suggesting that anyone had designs on their guns.)

It’s unclear to me if every candidate supports mandatory buybacks. Imprecision, after all, is the hallmark of gun-control rhetoric. Of course a non-coercive “buyback” program wouldn’t work either because no patriotic American is going to sell his firearms under market value. If you pay gun owners more than market value, they will surely turn a profit and purchase new weapons.

The criminal class and deranged would-be mass shooters have absolutely no incentive to participate, anyway. But you knew that.

Then there is the little matter of constitutionality. I’ve noticed an uptick in gun grabbers—a phrase that’s no longer hyperbole—arguing that Americans don’t need AR-15s to hunt, as if it mattered.

Although ARs are used by hunters, I’m certain nothing in the Second Amendment mentions hunting, because the right of self-defense—an individual concern, as well as a collective one—has nothing to do with shooting deer, and everything to do with protecting Americans from those who endeavor to strip them of their inalienable rights.

The District of Columbia v. Heller decision found that the Second Amendment protected weapons “in common use by law-abiding citizens.” The AR-15 clearly meets both criteria. It’s one of the most popular guns in America. Its semi-automatic mechanism is the same mechanism found in a majority of other legal firearms in the nation.

The arguments for a ban on “assault weapons”— a purposefully elastic phrase that allows the liberal legislator’s imagination to run wild — is centered on aesthetics, on the false claim that the AR is a “weapon of war,” and on the firearm tastes of a handful of deranged, sociopathic murderers.

Democrats and their allies like to mock these sorts of arguments as nothing more than semantics; mostly because they need to conflate and euphemize terms to make their arguments work. It’s how they generate favorable polling. I’m sure you’ve heard about the popularity of gun-control measures. But like “Medicare for all,” and other vaguely positive sounding policies, once voters learn what specifics entail, those numbers tend to settle along the usual partisan lines.

If you think you’re going to have overwhelming support for “mandatory gun buybacks” when people learn that you’re really talking about “the confiscation of 20 million guns,” you’re fooling yourself.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.

https://thefederalist.com/2019...e-lexington-concord/

Our founders foresaw a possible time like this and is exactly why they added the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights.

Even if democrats do get in power and implement gun bans that does not mean the next President and Congress can not overturn them which makes it very unlikely a large percentage of gun owners would turn theirs in right away if ordered to.

The good news is we all know exactly where the democrats stand and why they want registration.

We all need to do what we can to get out Second Amendment supporters to vote in 2018 and support our favorite Second Amendment Rights organizations and candidates including financially.

This isn't going to happen. And if it were to, it would be the opening of the next civil war.

If the left were smart, they'd run from this. They could continue to get rich through corruption and live the life they wish to. But no one ever accused them of being smart. They do this....and its game on.

quote:

Originally posted by jljones:
If the left were smart, they'd run from this.

There is more than enough data & studies that prove that the majority of firearm homicides in America occur in the small fraction of areas that contain concentrated Democrat (Left/Lib) voters. If one's goal is to reduce firearm homicides, then does it make more sense to spend time, money, and political capital to restrict everyone's Constitutional rights when the majority of the problem is restricted to a small subset of the population (Democrats/Left/Libs)?