Sen. Chris Coons Warns Democrats After Beto, Other Candidates Promote Gun Confiscation
“I frankly think that that [Beto] clip will be played for years at Second Amendment rallies,” Coons (D) said Friday.
Robert “Beto” O’Rourke has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks regarding his proposal to implement a mandatory gun buyback program should he get elected president in 2020.
While he’s been the loudest voice of all the candidates on the issue of pursuing what is actually a mandatory gun confiscation program, he is far from the only one.
There are other Democratic candidates who either have a much better shot of winning the nomination or who have been floated as possible vice presidential nominees who have also signaled they are on board with plans similar to O’Rourke’s.
The Associated Press reports:
Indeed, O’Rourke isn’t alone. None of the other nine candidates on the debate stage contradicted him on his proposal to require owners of the two popular styles of assault rifles to sell them to the government. Two candidates — New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and California Sen. Kamala Harris — have also called for mandatory buybacks of assault weapons. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, asked if she agreed with O’Rourke Thursday night, allowed only that she preferred a voluntary buyback to a mandatory one.
Earlier this month when Harris and Booker were in New Hampshire campaigning, both confirmed they supported a mandatory buyback program:
In New Hampshire on Friday, Senator Kamala Harris of California told reporters that requiring owners of assault weapons to sell them to the government is “a good idea” because “we have to take those guns off the streets.”
[…]
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker said he supports the proposal. He noted that other countries have been able to take military-style semiautomatic weapons “off the streets” and that the U.S. can’t let the National Rifle Association “tell us what’s possible.”
Like Beto, Booker is in the lower tier of candidates in terms of polling. Harris is in the second tier, but her numbers are steadily dropping. At this stage it seems unlikely that any of the three will capture any presidential momentum going into the primaries, but Booker and Harris both have been floated as vice presidential contenders.
Frontrunner Joe Biden and top tier candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have also stated their support for some sort of buyback program, though no candidate outside of O’Rourke was asked specifically about it during the third Democratic debate last Thursday. From a Fox News report last month:
In a recent television interview, former Vice President Joe Biden called for a “national buyback program” to get firearms “off the street.” Asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper to respond to criticism he would be taking away people’s guns, Biden responded, “Bingo! You’re right, if you have an assault weapon.”
Former Obama administration official Julián Castro, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock are among those who have expressed support for some sort of buyback program.
While Biden and Sanders have both indicated their “buybacks” would be voluntary, a strong nudge from a vice presidential candidate who supports mandatory programs could change the ballgame entirely over a period of time.
Even expanded background checks alone are part of a “step-by-step process” for Democrats to ultimately take your guns, says Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI):
“When you really understand what the endgame of the left is, it’s literally mandatory buybacks or as I call it: confiscation. This is a step-by-step process for them,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told The Hill Thursday when asked about the debate over expanded background checks for firearms sales.
Sen. Chris Coons (DE), who is a gun owner, warned his fellow Democrats Friday that they are playing into the hands of Republicans who have warned gun owners for years that Democrats were coming for their guns:
“I frankly think that that clip will be played for years at Second Amendment rallies with organizations that try to scare people by saying Democrats are coming for your guns,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware, told CNN’s Poppy Harlow on “Newsroom” Friday morning.
Asked if he’s supportive of O’Rourke’s pledge, Coons responded, “I am not.”
“I don’t think a majority of the Senate or the country is going to embrace mandatory buybacks. We need to focus on what we can get done,” Coons added.
Watch Coons speak on this issue below:
Sen. @ChrisCoons on Beto O’Rourke’s “Hell yes” line about taking away semi-automatic guns: “I frankly think that that clip will be played for years at second amendment rallies with organizations that try to scare people by saying Democrats are coming for your guns.” pic.twitter.com/YRNZctMx8a
— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) September 13, 2019
Failed Senate candidate O’Rourke responded by accusing Sen. Coons of only wanting to maintain the “status quo”:
Much respect to Sen. Coons for leading the fight on background checks. But the time for letting status quo politics determine how far we can go is over. If we agree that having millions of weapons of war on the streets is a bad idea, we have to do something about it. https://t.co/xf8tdKrMBJ
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 13, 2019
There are several million AR-15s in circulation throughout the country. A voluntary buyback will ultimately fail. A mandatory buyback will lead to violence and in the process rip this country apart.
If Democratic candidates were smart, they’d stop virtue signaling when it comes to gun confiscation and start getting real. But their base demands a high degree of “wokeness” on this issue, so here we are.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
The Democrats have spent generations encouraging their voters to demand more and still more extreme things from their elected officials. It’s only a matter of time before the D base demand that elected Democrats magically make all Republicans simply disappear from history — not merely pretend we never existed, but make it so we actually never existed.
And the Dems will make that promise, and then they’ll wonder why there’s so much political violence, and why the D base is rallying behind people advocating genocide.
Say, wasn’t there a DCCC leader recently who called for a ban on male candidates for public office? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2024 Democratic nominee for President!
Unrelated: I tried allowing “a small number of ads” on LI in my browser, but this small number includes animated ads moving at speeds that make it virtually impossible to concentrate on what I’m reading.
I come to LI to read the content, so if these ultra-high-speed animated ads are what I have to put up with to support your revenue stream, I have to stop supporting the revenue stream.
I don’t mind unobtrusive static ads. Ads that compete to cause epileptic seizures are a different matter.
I donate through PayPal and run AdBlock Plus on Firefox. The other day I was confronted with a roll up (?) overlay from the bottom of the screen that forced me to permit ads before it would disappear. After a day with ads, some of which annoyed me, I reset AdBlocker and started blocking individual elements whenever an ad makes it through. Wish that there were levels of membership here, whereby adds were completely suppressed for some agreeable donor level.
I did the same and wound up being assailed every other post by a giant, grotesque close-up of a mouth full of teeth being brushed at herky-jerky high speed. Sometimes it even seemed to follow me down the page. ugh. My adblocker is now back on.
It seems to me like gun rights advocates are ALWAYS on the defensive against the gun grabbers.
Why do I never hear reports of going offensive on them? For example, I was CC licensed in IL and now WA. IL cancelled my FOID when I moved to WA and then my CC. If I go back to IL with my firearm, I could/would be arrested and my firearm confiscated. Yet still, I have the right to keep and bear arms under the 2nd amendment.
Same thing happens if I go to Oregon.
I’d think gun owners would be suing the crap out of of adjacent states for infringing on their gun rights when they are legally licensed. By way of example, I don’t need a unique driver’s license for every state I’m driving through – nor a free speech license, etc.
Frankly I’d like to see enough suits brought against the states that the Supreme court would strike down all state-level gun laws as infringement on 2A.
Instead, it seems like we only ever defend ourselves from the gun grabbers and absent a good offensive strategy, if I want to carry my firearm in a more restrictive state, I just take my chances I won’t be stopped and searched.
When the majority of courts would look kindly on 2A in the past, the changing ideology underpinning many courts today make suits iffy. In Maryland, the ban on ARs came from a judge fully believing an AR can routinely crank out 600 rounds a minute. Plus the move to consider home defense the only need for a firearm since the glorious state will take care of all the rest and the state determines both need and what one can have. Who needs lifeboats these days when they only block the view?
I agree. I travel quite a bit and the patchwork quilt of laws and restrictions make it such that I must travel with no firearms, although Tennessee has reciprocal agreements with many states.
(The only suits the NRA will have are new ones for Wayne LaPierre’s wardrobe. )
If you haven’t seen it Griz, check out https://www.handgunlaw.us/LicMaps/ccwmap.php
When I took the IL CC course, the instructor tipped us to a class through Cabela’s for an Arizona and Utah combined course. I opted only for the Utah CC as an out-of-stater and keep it current – which gave me 35 states (+/-) of reciprocity. Arizona would have let me pick up NM and SC. I didn’t really need to get the WA CC permit with the UT permit. WA recognizes UT.
Wait ’til the Socialist-Progressives decide you can’t drive your gas-guzzler (35mpg) through their state without a special permit.
We don’t need a national driver’s license; why should we need a national gun/carry permit?
O’Rourke’s clip is the gift that keeps on giving.
O’Rourke may be toast, but I would not rule out his gun confiscation plan, which is modeled after the Third Reich’s successful efforts to disarm the German population and make the killing of Jews easier. A toxic combination of voting fraud, crooked Federal judges and law enforcement, and general voter apathy might be enough to make the Democrats’ dreams of genocide against the hated Deplorables come true.
Apathy is in my opinion the biggest problem. There are many millions who loathe the Democrat agenda, but have decided to vote for it anyway. They believed (1) that Democrats don’t really mean it, and (2) that if Trump is replaced by a Democrat things will go back to “normal” (whatever that means) and that a kinder, gentler non-Trump conservativism will re-take control after a brief period of absolute Democrat power. They don’t understand that progrsssivism is a one-way street, and the only way back to even a remote semblance of what the US was before would be a civil war that promises to make the 1861-1865 one look like a love fest.
“History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.”
– Karl Marx
Many of the tactics the left are using have been borrowed from the Third Reich and Hitler’s march to power grab. Brown Shirts, creating separation and building hatred up on particular groups of people, overstepping the laws and ignoring much of it to grab powers not given, indoctrination of the children through youth programs, using false news stories to keep the public uninformed of the truth…
This is the just part of the whole fascist package they live by, which is why they project it so much on those of the right side of the aisle.
What people have to understand about Bobby Frank’s confiscation scheme is that it would not be limited to AR and AK variants. In order to define these weapons, one has to use the operating system involved; self-loading, semiautomatic capable of accepting a high capacity magazine. Once you do that, this expands the number of affected firearms exponentially and would include a huge number of rifles strictly designed for civilian sporting purposes.
This whole weapons ban is a non-starter and will do nothing but clearly illustrate the fact that liberals, including Democrats, want to ban the private possession of all firearms.
Agreed. This is why I can’t stand gun owners who don’t care if the AR-15 or the AK-47 look-a-likes get banned but refuse to accept that other rifles would instantly be banned as well. They refuse to accept that their “hunting/sporting rifles” would be also in danger of being banned.
We could very quickly find ourselves with a government trying to ban everything except one round guns.
We could very quickly find ourselves with a government trying to ban
everything except one roundall guns.FIFY
Baito justifies this colossal gun grab with Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 3, which says, “…Congress shall have power…To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states…” Confiscating legally owned products that are unpopular with a political party is not regulating commerce. Thin at best.
All this hoopla is totally unnecessary and whipped up by democrats who desperately seek justification to disarm the American public. Big media rarely put the news in perspective. Even Bloomberg’s 2018 data reveals gun homicides declined seven percent, firearm injuries declined 10 percent, fatal child shootings (under 18) declined 12 percent and unintentional shootings plummeted 21 percent.
Generally, since 1991, the murder rate has fallen by 45 percent and the overall violent crime rate has fallen by 48 percent. And since 1999, the statistical probability of a student being killed in school by a gun has been one in 614,000,000. Further, shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the ’90s.
During that time, citizens were buying a record number of firearms. In 2018, more than 26 million firearms were purchased, a number exceeded only by 27.5 million in 2016 when purchasers were mortified that Hillary might be elected.
Murder rates nationwide, generally by any means, have dropped 52 percent over 20 years and violent crime by 49 percent to a 41-year low. Only about 323 deaths a year are caused by rifles characterized by democrats as assault weapons. In the same year, 496 Americans were killed with hammers and 650 with knives.
Bottom line is half the nation’s murders occur in only 63 counties while the other half are spread across the other 3,081 counties. Said another way, 15 percent had one murder and 54 percent of the nation’s counties had no murders at all. For what it’s worth, 25 percent of all gun crime happens in just four cities, all of which are run by Democrats. Seems the democrats want to change all that. I’d expect conservatives to be smarter.
He hopes you don’t realize that Amendments override Articles.
Probably but the fact is baito has no hope. (smile)
The preamble to the Bill of Rights informs us that the articles of the BOR are meant as a guarantee that the government has no authority to constrain, infringe upon, or regulate certain rights, activities, beliefs, etc. I realize you’re saying that if the commerce clause did give Congress the authority to regulate* firearms, the Second Amendment took that authority away. But the BOR’s preamble says that’s not so; Congress didn’t have that authority ever and the BOR guarantees that fact.
*The word “regulate” in the commerce clause means that Congress has the authority to make commerce “regular,” i.e. it has the authority to promote commerce between the states; not authority to restrict, infringe upon, or prevent such commerce, nor to throttle it by excessive control. The point of giving Congress exclusive legislative jurisdiction over interstate commerce was not to give Congress control over it, but rather to completely remove such control from the authority of the states.
The same meaning can be found in the Second Amendment, where “a well regulated militia” is one that is trained and equipped to an established standard, thereby being “made regular” or uniform.
Excellent reply.
A lot of people are conflating “death by gun” rates with “murder” rates. How many of the deaths by gun are suicides?
I would like to suggest that all buildings/structures over four stories are mandated to erect roof edge fences and install triple locks for all doors providing entry to such roofs>
I would like to suggest that Congress enact “red flag” laws that would enable LEOs to take away a person’s car upon the report from a neighbor or a relative that someone they know is depressed. Or take away a persons’s food because their BMI is too high.
Off Topic, but that picture strikes me. Bernie, no matter how decent a suit he wears, he looks like he slept in it. Frumpy, misshapen. Both of them look well past their sell by date. While Trump is no youngster, he doesn’t look as worn out and put away wet as these two do.
They also look like they have cognitive issues, as if they are trying their hardest to understand what is being said around them. Biden particularly looks like a deer in the headlights level of confusion.
That the left has wanted gun confiscation is no secret. They have wanted that for a long time, and it’s no shocker that they would push the issue given the shootings that have happened.
They know their gun grabbing would have no effect on the mass shootings. Either the murderers will find guns illegally or they will go with home made bombs, machetes, poisons, fire, whatever they can dream up to kill others. They are today’s serial killers, only instead of doing it one at a time, they do it all at once. Have you noticed we had a period of time in the 70’s particularly where there were a number of serial murderers. We’ve had bombings. Now the fad for these twisted and sick individuals is to go out in a blaze of glory via mass shootings. The media doesn’t help this. Posting the manifestos, mainly because they want to twist it into something to attack the conservatives with (funny how the backgrounds either change or aren’t talked about when it’s left wing bastards who are doing this.)
This is using a tragic and horrible event that stems from mental illness to step on another of the Bill of Rights amendments.
I’m not saying they don’t care about those who were killed or hurt, I don’t know them other than their sick public persona, but I really doubt they care as much as they pretend to, so just like they do with “immigration” they use it for their political goals.
I do believe they want to see a civil war, but they are desperate to have it start with shots fired from the “right”. That they started the last one, which they bury in their re-write of history, is beside the point. Hell, they even claim Lincoln as one of their own for the ignorant to be impressed by.
We barely have the Bill of Rights these days, many of them are in name only and not enforced. And the left is actively seeking to remove the others.
No wonder these two turds above look like escapees from a mental ward. It’s tough to make a sworn oath to defend something when you do all you can to destroy it.
I believe the anti-gun groups have already turned the legally-owned AR-15s, AK-47s, and standard-capacity magazines into contraband in CA, NJ, NY, IL, and possibly other states. Is that correct? I am more concerned about states infringing on our rights than the Feds.
I hope that gun owners will realize that anti-gun groups intend to confiscate these and others. The first step to confiscation is to pass a law requiring them to be registered, so they know whose houses to search later, when they pass a confiscation law.
Yes, that’s correct. CO is another one. In addition, 15 states have implemented “red-flag” laws so that if you donated to the Trump campaign, effectively anyone can file a complaint that you’re “dangerous” and the SWAT team can be sent.
And yes, Milhouse, I know the text of the law doesn’t say that. Anyone who doesn’t know already that this is how the law in fact works in Democrat jurisdictions is naive.
How can the government buy “back” something it never owned to begin with? And with the money it involuntarily took from us as well! Any law enforcement or military organization tasked with going door to door to enact this is on a suicide mission.
Spot on. The term “mandatory buyback” is oxymoronic. Buying requires the existence of a willing seller. Use of the term “mandatory” demonstrates how utterly absurd democrat rhetoric has become. “Buying” without a willing seller is theft. In this case it’s the government that has proposed theft. Not (ahem) buyin’ it.
It’s funny that Democrats fall all over themselves to provide for people’s rights to housing, education, medical care, etc. But when it comes to guns they’ve never even suggested that if I vote for them they’ll see to it that the government provides me with all the firearms and ammunition I need! In fact, they’re doing exactly the opposite, telling me I don’t need them and offering me money to take them off my hands!
Recognize that the American Democrat Party is in fact a Marxist-Communist/National Socialist party and has been for well over 100 years and it will all make perfect sense. They are America haters and Godless.
If anyone was ever under the impression that the Left of both parties were not after the total civilian disarmament of this nation,Bobby boy just persuaded them of that notion.
Since the turn of the 1900’s the organized opposition to the 2 nd. amendment has played out in this government,starting in 1934 with the un Constitutional NFA.
The Left have always been about complete civilian disarmament,no matter their public stated policy,they are the domestic enemy the founders warned of.
Speaking of the founders this is what they had to say on the subject.
Thomas Jefferson: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
Samuel Adams: “Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.”
Patrick Henry: “Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.”
Nathanael Greene: “I am determined to defend my rights and maintain my freedom or sell my life in the attempt.”
Thomas Jefferson (again): “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
Samuel Adams: (again) “The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.”
Marquis de Lafayette: “When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.”
John Parker (commander of the American forces who resisted the British attempt to confiscate Americans’ firearms): “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
But the time for letting status quo politics determine how far we can go is over.
Silly, Bobo. The Constitution determines how far the federal government can go on all things.
agree that insurrection may become our duty–if, by some accident/trick, the leftists/progs were able to pass some buyback program (mandatory or not)into law do not believe it would be enforceable–not taking the head-in-the-sand perspective only that they either know or are too stupid to realize that MILLIONS of citizens can and will resist and with potentially dire/lethal risks involved for whoever is tasked with enforcement/implementation