Cory Booker Won't Say How He'd Enforce His Gun Ban And "Buyback"

Presidential hopeful Cory Booker stopped by The View on Wednesday, and the conversation quickly turned to gun control; specifically the gun ban and compensated confiscation plan supported by both Booker and (much more vocally) Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke. While O’Rourke has offered up vague and contradictory statements about how he’d enforce the law and at times has declared that law enforcement would be coming to homes to take guns away, Booker refused to even attempt to explain how he’d enforce his gun ban and mandatory turn-in program.

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We can find the evidence-based way to accomplish this as a country. Other countries have done it. We did it with machine guns. Why are we playing into fear-mongerers that want to make you this vision that there’s going be people showing up to your house and taking your guns away?” Booker said. “We have more people die in America in my lifetime than in every single war combined, and we’re having arguments that divide us? All Americans agree on gun licensing — 70%, 80% do, agree on background checks, we can do this.”

“I’m not going to let us be divided by false arguments. There are things we can do, that if I’m president of the United States, I will get done,” Booker said.

Booker is full of it. We never banned machine guns in the United States and demanded people turn them over to law enforcement in exchange for some cash, which is what Booker’s proposing. As to playing into people’s fear, if Booker himself can’t explain how his law would be enforced, then some people are going to assume the worst. Why shouldn’t they, when Booker himself won’t say a bad word about O’Rourke declaring that police will go to people’s homes to take their guns away? The truth is that Cory Booker is running as a candidate of criminal justice reform, but his gun control plan would turn millions of Americans into criminals overnight. He can’t talk about how he’d enforce his proposed gun laws, because it means putting a lot of people in federal prison for simply possessing a firearm.

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That goes for Booker’s proposed gun licensing plan as well, which would be an even more egregious abuse of the Second Amendment than his ban on commonly owned rifles. Requiring a federal license to exercise a right is a terrible idea no matter what right we’re talking about, but a federal gun license specifically would not only infringe on the rights of Americans to keep and bear arms, but would likely be mainly enforced in places like New York City or Newark, New Jersey; deep blue urban areas that already have a lot of gun control laws on the books. I have a feeling that a lot of county sheriffs and chiefs in middle and rural America wouldn’t spend much time and energy enforcing a federal gun licensing law, though they may be parties to the inevitable lawsuits that would challenge the licensing requirement if Booker were ever able to pass his proposal through Congress.

Of course Cory Booker has about as much chance of becoming president as Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke does, which is also the same chance that I have of taking Whoopi Goldberg’s spot on The View. It’s not happening, but it’s also not just about Cory Booker or O’Rourke. It’s an unfortunate fact that the entire field of Democrats is as anti-gun a crop of candidates as we’ve ever seen, and no matter who the nominee may be, if they’re elected president they’re going to sign any and every gun control bill that gets to their desk. Elizabeth Warren has already said she’ll nuke the filibuster if she’s elected president, and other candidates have also indicated their support, so it could only take a simple majority in both chambers to pass legislation gutting the Second Amendment rights of Americans. That’s not fear-mongering. It’s just a fact.

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