In April 2018, running against Republican Ted Cruz in the Texas US Senate race, Democrat Beto O'Rourke went on Chad Hasty's radio show in Lubbock and made a great point of emphasizing his support for Americans' constitutional right to own guns.
Recalling that O'Rourke had said just a few weeks earlier that civilians should not be permitted to buy an AR-15 rifle, Hasty challenged him to defend his view.
"I own an AR-15; a lot of our listeners out there own AR-15s," Hasty said. "Why should they not have one?"
The congressman promptly insisted that he had no objection to owership of AR-15s.
"To be clear, they should have them," said O'Rourke. "If you purchased that AR-15, if you own it, keep it. Continue to use it responsibly. I think Texas has a real opportunity to lead on this issue right now, because we so jealously guard that Second Amendment. We believe in it, we'll defend it." Eventually he got around to acknowledging that he wanted sales of AR-15 to be barred (though he claimed to be open to a "conversation" about other approaches). But current gun owners, he stressed, had nothing to fear:
"We support the Second Amendment. If you own a gun, keep that gun, nobody wants to take it away from you – at least, I don't want to do that."
Turns out, that's exactly what he wants to do.
During the Democratic presidential candidates' debate last Thursday, O'Rourke dropped the pretense that he "jealously guard[s]" gun owners' Second Amendment rights. When ABC moderator David Muir asked him whether it's true that he would force owners of semiautomatic rifles — "You know that critics call this confiscation. Are you proposing taking away their guns?" — the former Texas congressman was bluntness itself:
"Hell, yes!" he replied, as the audience of Democratic Party activists cheered. "We're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47."
Within the hour, the O'Rourke campaign put out a fundraising tweet playing up his anti-gun stance. Under a picture of an AR-15, it proclaimed: "Beto has a ban for that." Forty-five minutes later, the campaign was marketing a new T-shirt. "HELL YES WE'RE GOING TO TAKE YOUR AR-15" it says in red, white, and blue letters. ($30; available in sizes from XS to 3XL).
None of the other candidates had a problem with O'Rourke's vow to confiscate a legal weapon owned by an estimated 15 million Americans . On the contrary, several went out of their way to praise his recent anti-gun rhetoric. Perhaps they figured it would do them no harm to applaud a candidate who poses no threat: With polls consistently putting his popularity at less than 2 percent, it seems clear that the former El Paso congressman isn't going to be his party's nominee.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the other candidates end up looking back with regret at O'Rourke's big moment. I think their failure to dissociate themselves from his impassioned declaration that "we're" going to confiscate Americans' guns is not one they will easily live down.
 The t-shirts were being offered for sale within two hours of O'Rourke's debate declaration. |
To be sure, some in the party were indeed aghast at what they heard. On CNN the morning after the debate, Delaware Senator Chris Coons disavowed O'Rourke's proposal, and predicted it would come back to bite Democrats hard.
"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,'" Coons said. "I am a gun owner. My sons and I have gone skeet shooting and hunting, and frankly I don't think having our presidential candidates . . . say that we are trying to take people's guns against their will is a wise . . . policy or political move."
He's right. AR-15s are among the most popular guns in the United States; according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, they account for as much as 60 percent of all civilian rifle sales. A party that threatens to — "Hell, yes!" — take those guns away is a party gambling with the loss of an awful lot of potential votes.
And many liberals and Democrats know it. That's why for years they have repeatedly insisted that nobody wants to confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens. The Washington Free Beacon on Friday released a striking video, showing a parade of left-wing politicians, media figures, and celebrities adamantly renouncing any intention of seizing people's weapons. Some excerpts:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "Nobody wants to take away their guns."
Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.): "Nobody wants to take away people's guns."
MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi: "Nobody in America has suggested banning any guns."
Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.): "I do not want to take away any gun rights."
California Governor Gavin Newsom: "Nobody is trying to take away people's guns."
MSNBC host Joy Reid: "Nobody who's called for gun-reform legislation is in favor of taking guns away from owners."
Meet the Press Moderator Chuck Todd: "Nobody is interested in taking away guns."
African-American activist April Reign: "No one is trying to take guns away, right?"
Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.): "Nobody's trying to take guns out of the hands of hunters."
Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Center to Prevent Gun Violence: "It's an interesting thing to respond to — 'We just want to take away all your guns.' Well, actually, that can never happen."
Hillary Clinton: "I'm not here to take away your guns."
Symone Sanders, 2016 press secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign: "No one's trying to take guns away from folks."
Sarah Silverman, entertainer and progressive activist: "No one wants to take your guns away."
Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm: "Nobody is talking about confiscating guns."
Perhaps some of those assurances were voiced in good faith. Or perhaps gun confiscation was always the intended endgame, but one that Democratic activists were unwilling to acknowledge. Either way, now there can be no more pretending. The eruption of cheers that greeted O'Rourke's "Hell, yes!," and the failure of anyone on stage to demur, will convince many voters that whatever anti-gun lobbyists may say today, what they intend for tomorrow is to seize guns from millions of Americans whose right to own them is guaranteed by the nation's fundamental legal charter.
Which means, as National Review points out in an editorial,
that a host of commonly posed inquiries now have the same simple answer. "Why do you oppose federal licensing?" Because leading Democrats are threatening confiscation. "Why do you oppose 'universal' background checks?" Because they would create a registry. "And why do you oppose a registry?" Because leading Democrats are threatening confiscation. Unwittingly or not, O'Rourke and his acolytes have stuck a dagger into the exquisitely calibrated gun-control messaging on which their party has worked for the better part of 20 years. No voter can now say he wasn't warned.
This anti-gun fanaticism is an old, old story with Democrats.
More than 25 years ago, the prominent liberal legal scholar Sanford Levinson pleaded with his fellow progressives to start listening to the wide swath of the American public that cherishes the right to own guns enshrined in the Constitution and fears that the left, given a chance, will go much too far in trying to regulate gun possession. "Such a willingness to listen — and to concede that one might indeed have something to learn — is an essential first step in repairing the breach between liberal Democratic Party elites and the gun-owning constituency most suspicious of them," Levinson wrote in 1992.
His words proved prescient two years later, when the Democrats' embrace of new gun control measures, including a federal assault-weapons ban, led to sweeping Republican gains in the 1994 midterm elections, and a GOP takeover of both houses of Congress for the first time in half a century. In his autobiography , former President Bill Clinton conceded that "the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban inflamed the Republican base voters and increased their turnout," contributing to at least half the losses Democrats suffered that year. Exit polls showed that gun owners were one of the demographic groups most likely to vote. Of 276 congressional candidates endorsed by the National Rifle Association, 221 won.
Yet then as now, the mere mention of the NRA in liberal circles evoked rage and abhorrence.
Earlier this month, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution libeling the NRA as "a domestic terrorist organization." It called for any financial dealings with the organization to be curtailed, and urged other cities, states, and the federal government to take similar steps. This hatred of an entirely peaceful advocacy organization, one with 5 million members — none of whom has ever been linked to terrorism — isn't limited to the Bay Area. In a new Rasmussen Poll , one-third of Democrats nationwide express support for the "terrorist group" designation, and 28 percent say that Americans should be prohibited by law (!) from belonging to organizations that promote the rights of gun owners.
This is bonkers. It says far more about the deranged hoplophobia on the left than about any danger posed by civilian gun owners.
Have guns been used to commit terrible crimes? Obviously. Yet 99.9% of legally owned weapons are never used to commit any criminal offense. The hostility toward "assault" rifles is even more unhinged, inasmuch as rifles — rifles of all kinds — are used less frequently to commit homicide than hammers, fists, knives, or (by a wide margin) handguns.
Moreover, gun ownership is normal. Gallup reports that 43 percent of Americans live in households with firearms. Despite all the hyperventilation and emotion surrounding the topic, most voters in this country know perfectly well that guns and gun owners are not evil. Many also know from personal experience that guns prevent crime and save lives: According to an in-depth study undertaken by the Obama administration, guns are used defensively hundreds of thousands of times each year.
It is this broad awareness of the benefits of gun ownership, not the malign influence of the NRA, that explains why Congress continues to shy away from stiff new gun controls. Why, for example, has the Clinton-era assault weapons ban (which expired in 2004), never been renewed? In last week's debate, Senator Elizabeth Warren chalked it up to "corruption, pure and simple," claiming that Congress is "beholden to the gun industry." But that's an unworthy slur. While Warren voted Yea on reinstating the ban, 60 of her Senate colleagues — including 16 Democrats — voted Nay. Over in the House, meanwhile, even with a healthy majority, Democrats have not approved a ban. The day before last week's debate, in a story headlined " Divided Democrats Step Back From Assault Weapons Ban," the New York Times reported that the votes simply aren't there to pass it.
"Let's be honest," said Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, the sponsor of the current assault weapons measure, who described himself as a "huge proponent" of the ban. "Every other bill that we've done tries to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them. This is the one piece of legislation that keeps a particular weapon out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. A lot of people have enormous objections to that."
It is no small thing to enact legislation that encroaches on what millions of Americans consider a basic privilege of citizenship. Even Beto O'Rourke, when he was running for Congress last year, knew better than to trumpet a desire to confiscate millions of Americans' guns. Now that he's out of Congress and running a lost-cause race for the White House, he isn't hiding anything. "Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15," he thunders to raucous cheers and applause. The true-believers in the Democratic base ate it up. But it's Republicans who will gain from O'Rourke's unvarnished frankness.
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ICYMI
In Sunday's column , I tried to make sense of the call by top Democratic presidential candidates for a total ban on the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." My conclusion: Their opposition is rooted in blind ideological opposition to the fossil fuel industry, not science. Because of fracking, natural gas has supplanted coal as the primary fuel for the nation's power plants, and natural gas releases far less carbon dioxide when burned. Hence, fracking has led to a dramatic reduction in America's greenhouse gas emissions. Anyone for whom reducing atmospheric CO2 is a priority should celebrate what fracking has made possible, not demand that it be shut down.
My column on Wednesday was about why so many of Hong Kong's protesters have been waving American flags and even singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." It isn't the first time that people demonstrating against repressive governments have embraced symbols of the United States. The explanation lies in America's unique historical mission. Ours is the only nation in history founded on the conviction that freedom is an inalienable right. No other people has ever cared so deeply about advancing human rights and self-government beyond its own borders, nor done so as successfully. The very idea of America has the power to inspire people struggling for their liberty, and that inspiration is reflected in the sea of US flags on Hong Kong's streets.
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The last line
"They kissed once. Then he turned upon his heel and disappeared into the Darkness." — Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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