Mandatory Gun Buyback is a Silly Euphemism

That's the subheading for David Harsayni's most recent piece at The Federalist.  Since the mass shootings that have taken place since May, several Democratic candidates for President have called for "mandatory buybacks" of modern sporting rifles like the AR-15.  Robert Francis "Beto" O'rourke has been the most out front with this proposal.

“I want to be really clear that that’s exactly what we are going to do,” the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said. “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.”

Harsayni points out why this is simply confiscation by another name:

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 are ready to instantaneously turn millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals overnight for refusing to adhere to a law that retroactively transformed the exercise of a constitutional right into criminality.

He goes on to remind readers that in 2017, the most recent year for which we have data, there was a "near-historic" low of 7,032 murders committed with handguns, and 403 committed with “rifles” of any kind, not only “assault weapons,” and by comparison, there were 1,591 homicides committed with knives, 467 people killed with blunt objects, and another 696 with fists and kicking during the same time span.

A better way to deal with these criminal misuse of firearms is criminal control, not gun control. But control criminals is now what the gun ban lobby is all about, they are about taking away the rights of law-abiding gun owners.