In the aftermath of what was likely the most successful Gun Rights Policy Conference in its 34-year history, a story in the Deseret News, while not directly related to the Phoenix gathering, underscores much of what was said by many speakers about the ineffectiveness of gun control laws.
Headlined “The gun violence solution that experts say won’t work,” the article takes a look at so-called “gun buyback” programs, particularly the mandatory one that is being championed by Democrat presidential hopeful Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke. His remarkably candid threat to gun owners during a heat-of-the-moment discussion about gun control has galvanized Second Amendment activists and, according to rights advocates such as Alan Gottlieb of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, laid bare the true agenda of O’Rourke’s party contemporaries.
None of them so much as raised an eyebrow when he declared, “Hell yes! We’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” This can only be interpreted one way, say activists.
Gottlieb said in a prepared statement, “Thanks to O’Rourke, Democrats have just graduated from being the ‘party of gun control’ to officially being the ‘party of gun confiscation,’ and nobody in the firearms community is going to forget that.
“From this moment forward,” he added, “when Democrats talk about ‘gun reform’ or ‘gun safety,’ the whole country will know they’re not just talking about gun control, they’re talking about taking firearms from law-abiding citizens who have committed no crime.”
The Deseret News article talked about O’Rourke’s “mandatory gun buyback program in which the government requires that anyone with an assault weapon turn it in to the government, and then be compensated for it.”
But activists attending the Phoenix conference uniformly agreed that O’Rourke and the establishment media can call this anything they want, but in reality, this is “compensated confiscation.”
As Michael Scott, a professor at the Arizona State University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice told the newspaper, “A mandatory buyback program is in essence a confiscation of property and that is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. I cannot imagine that it would be politically palatable or likely to generate results.”
And Lara Smith, national spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club and a Phoenix conference speaker, added this: “Our organization completely opposes it. If we don’t stand for every single civil right for every single person, I see it as a slippery slope.”
The gun prohibition lobby’s lexicon has changed and it is alarming to conference speakers such as Dan Wos, author of Good Gun Bad Guy and Good Gun Bad Guy II that the establishment media has adopted their lingo.
During remarks at the conference, he assailed terms now in common use by anti-gunners such as “assault weapon,” which was invented in the 1990s and was “designed to scare people.” He ridiculed phrases such as “blood on your hands” which he said are designed to blame gun owners “for anything that happens” involving firearms.
“But the big daddy of them all,” Wos observed, “is the term ‘gun violence.’ There is no such thing as gun violence. Gun violence doesn’t exist. There is human violence…They’d much rather have you focus on the problem as being a gun issue. It’s a straw man argument.”
For the past several years, the gun prohibition lobby understood that the idea of “gun control” is politically toxic, so they adopted terms that fall under the definition of “camo speak,” that is, words and phrases used to conceal the true intent of the speaker. They replace “gun control” with more positive-sounding terms as “gun safety” or “gun reform” or – as has been wholeheartedly adopted by a Seattle-based lobbying group, “gun responsibility.”
But initiatives passed in Washington State over the past five years do not appear to have had any discernible impact on homicides, except, perhaps, in the negative. In 2014, the year Washington voters passed Initiative 594, a “universal background check” initiative, the state reported 94 gun-related murders. In 2015, there were 141 firearm-related homicides. In 2016, the number dropped to 127, but in 2017 it bounced back up again to 134, according to data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports for all of those years.
Data for 2018 is not yet available, and the impact of Initiative 1639, which was passed last year and added new gun restrictions this year, will not be evident until September 2020, when the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2019 will be released.
But in the meantime, rights activists know the gun control rhetoric will continue, and it all means the same thing and leads ultimately to the same result, they believe: restricting a fundamental right and demonizing the people who exercise it.
Do you believe the Democrats are simply interested in limiting certain guns or all out gun control through gun confiscation? Share your answer and reasons in the comment section.
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is an award-winning career journalist with an expertise in firearms and the outdoors. He is the author of several books dealing with firearms politics. He has a degree in editorial journalism from the University of Washington and is a lifelong Washington resident.
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The only way “universal background checks will work is to register all guns so the law can be sure that all transactions have passed the background check. If a gun has not been registered with the government, there is no way to track it and therefor no way to insure a background check was made at the time transfer. As for registering firearms; take a look at Germany during WWII and recently Britain and Australia. And now New Zealand is looking into the same type of scheme. Once firearms are registered and background checks are mandatory, the government knows where every one of them is, making them very easy to come after. As for taking them from your cold dead hands, count on it, they will gleefully. Universal Background Checks are just a prelude to confiscation. The next major gun violence episode will be another step to just taking the next class of firearm from law abiding citizens until there are none left to defend yourself with. Then you will notice the Socialists in government will actually stop hiding behind elections and just take over and there will little that can be done against an armed government without a gun and ammunition of your own.
I know some folks who vote Democrat. Those same folks are gun owners and blindly believe that restrictions are all the Democrat leaders want. So no, I think a lot of Democrat voters are naive…not all gun banners. Some stand by the constitution. I thought we had a pro-gun Democrat in Heidi Heidcamp here in North Dakota, but she proved that she was not with her votes in office. We gave her our opinion when she came up for re-election. Kevin Cramer took her place!
There is no doubt Democrats want to confiscate our guns even while they are being protected by heavily armed bodyguards. Anything or anybody who does not cow tow to more government control of their lives or anyone who threatens the mantra that government knows best will be a target. Our weapons are just the start of it.
Almost Boogaloo Time. YOU’LL NEVER GET THIS……YOU’LL NEVER GET THIS….Lalalala (Beto Memes Overload on Youtube)
Did any one watch a PBS show of 1920 to 1930 era coal mining in W. Virginia a few weeks back? They were trying to unionize to get better wages and living conditions in the company owed towns. The miners at one point band together in “arms” to try and stave off the threats coming from company owners, local law enforcement, Federal forces And General Billy Mitchell came to determine using the Army Air Force to drop bombs on them. He did not do it, but the Sheriff of I think Logan county actually tried it with little to no effect. How much more Technically advanced is our military / law enforcement now than then. How do we take up arms to defeat a military ordered by a corrupt government, which can sit in an easy chair and do pinpoint strikes on any one they deem a threat to them.