Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been churning out plan after plan in her bid to be the Democrat’s nominee for president in 2020. Most of her plans are wildly ill-considered and untenable, but her latest roll-out on “gun violence prevention” is positively bone-chilling.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has unveiled a comprehensive plan to reduce gun violence by enacting a suite of new restrictions on buyers, cracking down on sellers and breaking “the (National Rifle Association’s) stranglehold on Congress” with anti-corruption legislation.The proposal arrives as more than 15 Democratic primary candidates prepare to take turns speaking at a gun safety forum in Des Moines, Iowa, and a week after the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.”The next President has a moral obligation to use whatever executive authority she has to address the gun crisis,” Warren writes in a Medium post. “But it is obvious that executive action is not enough. Durable reform requires legislation — but right now legislation is impossible. Why? A virulent mix of corruption and abuse of power.”
The details of the proposal are horrifying, but I want first to address CNN’s report about Warren’s demands of Walmart.
On Friday, Warren called on retail giant Walmart to remove firearms from its shelves.”Companies that sell guns have a responsibility to the safety of their communities. @Walmart is one of the largest gun retailers in the world,” she tweeted. “The weapons they sell are killing their own customers and employees. No profit is worth those lives. Do the right thing—stop selling guns.”Walmart has said it plans to remove displays for violent video games from its stores, but has no plans to further reduce its gun selection. The company does not sell assault-style rifles, a change made after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, or any weapons to people under 21 years old.”I think it would be more effective if instead of taking down pictures of guns, they actually stopped selling guns,” Warren told reporters after an event in Iowa on Friday.
As a wise friend pointed out, this attack on Walmart is not only unfounded but extremely revealing in terms of the radical left’s true plans.
As even CNN notes, Walmart does not sell “assault-style rifles” (since 2015) or handguns (since 1993). Walmart also raised the age of the people to whom it will sell firearms to 21, despite there being no law requiring them to do so. Nor have I been able to locate any evidence that a Walmart-purchased rifle has been linked in any way to any mass shooting.
So why the push to get Walmart to stop selling guns? It’s certainly not related to stopping mass shootings. The extremist left can’t get guns banned entirely, so they want to ensure they can’t be sold to law-abiding Americans.
So far, Walmart isn’t biting.
Gun control advocacy groups hope Walmart, one of the nation’s top sellers of firearms, will reconsider its role in weapons sales in the aftermath of a shooting rampage that killed at least 22 people at one of its stores in El Paso, Texas.. . . . But Walmart has no such plans, company spokesman Randy Hargrove told CBS MoneyWatch. “There is no change in any company policy,” Hargrove said. “No retailer is immune to violence,” he added of Saturday’s bloodshed, which came days after an employee shot and killed two other workers at a Walmart in Southaven, Mississippi.. . . . Walmart last month said it would no longer sell guns in New Mexico after a state law took effect requiring background checks for nearly all private gun sales except antiques and between relatives. The law lets federally licensed gun sellers, including Walmart, provide background checks.The retailer stopped selling handguns in 1993 and assault-style weapons in 2015. Three years later, after a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, it hiked the minimum age for gun and ammo purchases to people 21 and older.Walmart said in a statement at the time that its “heritage as a company has always been in serving sportsmen and hunters, and we will continue to do so in a responsible way.” The company, the world’s biggest retailer by revenue, doesn’t disclose its gun sales.
Radical leftists like Warren want only criminals (and the government) to have guns. Newsflash: they probably don’t get their firearms from Walmart.
Warren’s war on the Second Amendment includes raising taxes on both firearms and ammo and eliminating the filibuster to ensure that gun-grabbing legislation passes the Senate.
Less than a week after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released one of the most sweeping gun policy proposals of the Democratic presidential candidates. And she’s set a big objective for the plan: to get US gun deaths down by 80 percent.
It’s an ambitious, if not downright impossible, goal — one that would attempt to shift US levels of gun violence down to that of America’s developed peers. But Warren’s plan goes further than the typical Democratic proposals, which are mostly focused on universal background checks and an assault weapons ban, to start moving America in that direction.
. . . . Her proposal begins with executive actions to expand background checks, close loopholes in current gun laws, and target gun traffickers and licensed gun dealers who break the law. She proposes sweeping legislation, including universal background checks and an assault weapons ban but also a system requiring a license to buy and own guns as well as urban gun violence intervention programs.
She also vows to revisit the issue of guns every year, “adding new ideas and tweaking existing ones based on new data — to continually reduce the number of gun deaths in America.”
Yes, you read that right, part of her proposal includes a mandatory federal “gun licensing” program, a program we all know would mean a federal database of all legal gun owners.
Vox continues:
On the legislative side, Warren’s plan includes universal background checks and an assault weapons ban, paired with a ban on high-capacity magazines. It also aims to repeal more loopholes in existing gun laws, end special legal protections for gun companies, improve oversight of gun dealers, and raise the minimum age for gun sales to 21.
But she also proposes policies that go further than Democrats have generally gone, at least before 2020. For one, she proposes a federal system that would require everyone obtain a license to own and buy a gun. She would pair that with the mandatory registration of guns — essentially requiring, like cars, license and registration. It’s a system the research shows can reduce gun deaths more effectively than simple background checks, and a key reason why Warren’s home state of Massachusetts, with a similar system at the state level, has the lowest gun death rate in the country.
Warren also proposes a one-week waiting period for firearm purchases and a higher tax on gun manufacturers. And with her assault weapons ban, she proposes a program that would force current assault weapon owners — with the threat of penalties — to dispose or register the guns.
Warren’s plan includes a combination of executive action, including EO’s, and legislative action. Vox does have some well-reasoned good news:
It’s unlikely all of this could really pass Congress (especially if Republicans continue to control the Senate), with or without new anti-corruption laws. Even if her plan passes, just about all these ideas are likely to face court challenges — which could ultimately succeed in front of a conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
One of Warren’s problems, and it’s a problem across the extremist gun-grabbing left, is that she seems to imagine that Americans can’t wait to have our Second Amendment rights (further) curtailed.
From her proposal:
And while the majority of Americans — including a majority of gun owners — support sensible gun legislation, even the most basic proposals, like universal background checks, are consistently blocked by far-right ideologues in Congress who are bought and paid for by the gun industry, their NRA partners, and a supporting army of lobbyists and lawyers.
She sets up a whole host of strawmen and completely ignores the hundred million (plus?) Americans who do not want their gun rights infringed in any way.
Those “far-right ideologues in Congress” are in Congress because they were elected by their (likely gun-toting) constituents. The NRA and an “army of lobbyists and lawyers” have whatever power they have because they’re supported by Americans who voted for Republicans over gun-grabbing lefties who consistently forget this huge swath of the American electorate even exists.
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