At the outset of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, it looked as though only a couple of the candidates were going to go full-on gun-grabber in an attempt to win over America’s liberal voters. Rep. Eric Swalwell was one of the loudest nutjobs out of the gate, proclaiming proudly that he would make “assault weapons” illegal and follow up the ban with confiscation of some sort. But as the campaign season has matured, more and more of the candidates are coming out with policy proposals that go at least as far as Swalwell’s. This radicalism was on clear display in the first debates, where each candidate seemed eager to “outgun” the others…so to speak.
“We should have smart guns,” said former Vice President Joe Biden, who is being pulled to the left on this and other issues. “No gun should be able to be sold unless your biometric measure could pull that trigger. It’s within our right to do that. We can do that. Our enemy is the gun manufacturers, not the NRA.”
Biden’s decision to let the NRA off the hook certainly won’t be popular with the left, which has cherished making the pro-gun organization its number-one bogeyman, but his idea of banning all guns without biometric locks is ludicrous. The technology is not there yet – what’s more, it’s not on the market. If Biden were to make sign such a law, it would essentially constitute a ban on every gun in America. Not sure whether to mark this as radical or merely uninformed.
As for Swalwell, he hasn’t backed off the issue either. Months after getting into a spat on Twitter where he essentially threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on any American who resisted his extreme gun policies, the California congressman said that he would ban all “military-style semiautomatic assault weapons.”
“Keep your pistols,” he said, magnanimously. “Keep your rifles. Keep your shotguns. But we can take the most dangerous weapons from the most dangerous people.”
The vast majority of the 15 million AR-15-type rifles in America are, of course, not in the hands of “the most dangerous people.” But why let inconvenient facts get in the way of your horror story?
Kamala Harris praised Swalwell’s idiotic ban-and-buyback plan, but she said she was prepared to go even further.
“I will give the United States Congress 100 days to pull their act together, bring all these good ideas together and put a bill on my desk for signature,” she said. “And if they do not, I will take executive action, and I will put in place the most comprehensive background check policy we’ve had.”
And on down the line: From Kristen Gillibrand to Bernie Sanders to Pete Buttigieg, every Democrat has signed on to gun measures that are blatantly unconstitutional and borderline tyrannical. It’s an extremist’s market in this party; hopefully, the American people aren’t buying.
