Most Democrat gun owners support the right to keep and bear arms. There was a time when the Democrat party did too. Unfortunately, that changed decades ago. Today, gun control and civilian disarmament are all but the official Democrat party position.
Do gun-owning Democrats believe their own politicians? Even if their particular candidate hasn’t advocated the confiscation of guns today, he will vote with a party that champions “compensated confiscation” and adding more gun control laws to the tens of thousands of firearm regulations already on the books.
Arizona Democrat Senator Mark Kelly, who never appears on the campaign trail without his astronaut jacket, said “It is f@cking nuts” not to pass more gun-control laws after the murders at a grocery store in New York and at a school in Texas. Kelly didn’t comment on the fact that the sites of those attacks were “gun-free” zones where ordinary citizens were disarmed by law.
Senator Kelly says that the police should be armed, but we should not. He ignored the fact that hundreds of police officers stood outside an unlocked classroom door while children were being murdered in Uvalde, Texas. Senator Kelly didn’t comment on the 1.6 million times each year that honest citizens use guns to defend themselves.
Georgia Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock voted to ban modern sporting rifles. Fortunately, that provision didn’t have enough support to pass the US Senate. The bill he supported would fund cameras in schools, but money could not be spent to put more armed police officers or armed school staff on campus.
Senator Warnock wants armed security for himself and his family but wants to deny it to our children. Warnock received a “strong endorsement” from the Giffords gun-control organization.
Nevada Democrat Senator Catherine Masto was a co-sponsor of the bill that encouraged states to enact due process-free “red flag” laws. The idea behind these “red flag” laws is that concerned family members can ask the police to take a relative’s firearms. The problem is most red-flag laws remove a person’s firearms before the individual is represented by legal counsel in court proceedings.
These laws allow confiscation, but without providing mental health treatment for those who may need it. For the last two decades, some states have had mandatory background checks and mental health laws that allowed involuntary confinement and firearms confiscation. Senator Masto didn’t mention that those states didn’t reduce their rates of suicide.
Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman has said a lot about gun control. He wants to ban modern sporting rifles. As a US Senator, Fetterman would outlaw both the sale of these firearms and their possession. He doesn’t say how he would remove the more than 25 million modern sporting rifles that are already owned by law-abiding citizens. Neither does he say how disarming them will stop criminals and the few people who commit mass murder in order to receive worldwide publicity.
He wants the rest of the US to have the kind of gun control laws found in places like California, New York, and New Jersey.
Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes has pushed for background checks and red-flag laws. After the attack by ISIS terrorists at a concert in France, Barnes said that people who believe in “God, country, and guns is as dangerous of a rhetoric here as it is over there.”
Barnes supported a ban on homemade firearms, bans on modern rifles, and made firearms manufacturers and distributors financially responsible for the actions of criminals who use a gun. Barnes also proposed a ban on ammunition magazines that hold more than 20 rounds.
Barnes does not say how this would affect the millions of people who legally use a firearm in self-defense each year, though he has said he “really could not care less about a 2nd Amendment ‘right’.”
Evan McMullin is running as an independent candidate for the US Senate in Utah. His campaign brochure proposes more “sensible gun-safety legislation.” It is hard to tell what that means beyond the fact that McMullin encouraged Utah Senator Mike Lee to follow the example of Senator Mitt Romney and vote with Democrats to move more gun control legislation through the Senate.
McMullin was a CIA operations officer until 2010. His previous political experience consists of running against President Donald Trump as an independent in 2016 and despite denials, he’s widely expected to caucus with Senate Democrats if he’s elected.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has said we need more gun control. She didn’t explain which of the existing 23,000 gun control regulations failed when a teenager stole his father’s gun and murdered his classmates in a Michigan high school.
Some county clerks and police departments in Michigan stopped processing firearms applications after 2019. Some counties imposed over a year’s delay in processing the state-required paperwork. Whitmer vetoed legislation that would require government officials to process firearms-related permits during emergencies.
Whitmer called “gun violence” a public health emergency. She didn’t explain how most counties in America will not have a murder of any kind, yet more than half of our murders occur in just two percent of our counties, mostly in our failing cities.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has little use for armed citizens other than on duty as her security guards. Hochul said, “This whole concept that a good guy with a gun will stop the bad guys with a gun, it doesn’t hold up. And the data bears this out, so that theory is over.”
She ignores the 1.6 million times or more that an armed citizen uses a firearm for legally justified self-defense. She called for and signed the sweeping new gun-control bills that made most of New York state into one big “gun-free” zone. Somehow, Governor Hochul ignored the fact that mass murderers prefer such “gun-free” zones.
Huge numbers of gun control laws have been enacted and tried for decades. We’re told that while this mountain of laws hasn’t stopped violent crime yet, the next gun-control law is sure to work.
After missing the target 23,000 times, I’m skeptical that one more regulation limiting what law-abiding gun owners can own or do will be any more effective than the rest. Do Democrat gun owners believe that?