In the aftermath of two horrific shootings over the weekend, Vox is quite comfortable calling for what the anti-gun left has wanted in this country since the lat 1960’s — full-on gun confiscation.
But let’s be clear about precisely what kind of decision is letting events like this recur, most recently in Dayton and El Paso. Congress’s decision not to pass background checks is not what’s keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What’s behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.
Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.
Other countries have done exactly that. Australia, for example, enacted a mandatory gun buyback that achieved that goal, and saw firearm suicides fall as a result. But the reforms those countries enacted are far more dramatic than anything US politicians are calling for — and even they wouldn’t get us to where many other developed countries are.
– Dylan Matthews in What no politician wants to admit about gun control
And now at least one Democrat presidential candidate feels comfortable advocating door-to-door gun grabs, too.
Sen.@KamalaHarris willing to send cops to people’s homes to confiscate banned firearms. https://t.co/H1Q9Nle1gs
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) August 5, 2019