Senior Democrat Calls For Gun Confiscation

It’s not exactly a secret that the Democrat Party opposes the right to keep and bear arms, but usually Democrats at least pretend to respect the Second Amendment. We only want guns regulated for safety, they claim, to keep them out of the hands of dangerous people and keep “weapons of war” off the streets. But every once in a while, a Democrat accidentally says what he or she is really thinking: all out confiscation.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that Dan Pfeiffer, an former advisor to former President Barack Obama, has published an op-ed in which he urges Democrats to stop paying lip service to law-abiding gun owners and engage in what amounts to a full-on assault on gun rights, a straight-up advocacy for confiscation of privately owned guns:

“We are nibbling around the edges instead of proposing bold, meaningful solutions,” Pfeiffer wrote. His suggestions included implementing a national gun registry, mandating “smart-gun technology,” and rolling-out a buy-back program similar to Australia’s.

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Pfeiffer accused Democrats of being “brainwashed” into expressing support for the Second Amendment and the culture of gun owners.

“Democratic politicians have been brainwashed by political hacks like me to begin all of their statements about guns by declaring support for the Second Amendment and a deep affinity for the cultures of hunters and sportsmen,” Pfeiffer wrote.

This is a good opportunity to remind people that Pfeiffer’s old boss Obama, despite the “reasonable centrist” posturing he got elected on, thought America should follow Australia’s lead with mandatory gun-buybacks (de facto confiscation). And both of them are full of it.

On October 3, former FiveThirtyEight statistician Leah Libresco wrote one of the bravest op-eds ever published in the Washington Post, in which she admitted that after actually digging into the data on gun violence, “case for the [gun control] policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence.”

Among her findings was the following revelation about our supposed overseas betters:

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

Being bankrupt on cause and effect, it should come as no surprise that Pfeiffer is also bankrupt on the law. He goes on to justify all this by asserting that we’ve been reading the Second Amendment wrong all this time, and that it doesn’t really protect an individual right to keep and bear arms after all:

“The interpretation of the Second Amendment that prevails on the far right today was reverse-engineered to pander to fantasists,” he wrote […]

“The Second Amendment is in many ways an anachronism, framed before the age of drones and cruise missiles, when a well-armed civilian militia have actually been capable of turning back a foreign invasion,” Pfeiffer wrote. “Times change. This is not Red Dawn. You are not Patrick Swayze. Chill out.”

Well, let’s see what George Mason University constitutional law professor Nelson Lund has to say about that:

Implicit in the debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists were two shared assumptions: first, that the proposed new constitution gave the federal government almost total legal authority over the army and the militia; and second, that the federal government should not have any authority at all to disarm the citizenry. The disagreement between Federalists and Anti-Federalists was only over the narrower question of how effective an armed population could be in protecting liberty.

But let’s close this on one rare case of bipartisan agreement. Pfeiffer says that without “writ[ing] off ‘gun voters'” (whatever that means while trying to sell them these insane policies), Democrats “should stop trying to win them over with insincere pandering on the gun issue.”

I couldn’t agree more. We should all strongly encourage every Democrat in the country to take Pfeiffer’s advice and fully advocate for confiscation of privately-owned firearms. Campaign on it. Shout it from the rooftops. The results at the ballot box will be absolutely wonderful for America’s future.

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