By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has a gun control plan that gun owners are not going to like. (Screen snip, YouTube, CBS 60 Minutes)
Democrat Presidential hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) who was pro-gun as a congresswoman from her district but did a full 180-degree policy shift when she was elected to the U.S. Senate, said she would push a “buy-back” program for so-called “assault weapons” and for felony charges against those who refused to comply if elected.
Recently on CNN, Gillibrand stated, “The point is you don’t want people using assault weapons so the point is if you’re arrested for using an assault weapon you’re going to be arrested for an aggravated felony. The whole point is when you make it a crime to own an assault weapon then if you are found using it, that would be the issue. It would be part of law enforcement.”
Appearing on ABC This Week, Gillibrand explained, “You want to make it illegal to buy or sell these assault weapons, and as part of your efforts, you would offer money, a buyback.”
The Democrat candidate also had this to say during her ABC appearance: “I don’t think we want to live in a world where young children are learning shelter-in-place drills, as opposed to math drills, that’s the truth of where we are.”
Her remarks have been criticized by Second Amendment activists because what she is advocating is the kind of mandatory confiscation of firearms that happened in Australia a couple of decades ago. The fact that gun owners would be compensated is irrelevant, activists argue, because the surrender of firearms would still be mandatory, with criminal prosecution as a threat for non-compliance.
Townhall noted recently how “Democrat presidential candidates have been tripping all over themselves this week in an effort to politically capitalize on back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.”
Gillibrand is proud of her “F” rating from the National Rifle Association.
A look at her Senate website also reveals she likes to partner with anti-gun Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) on all manner of legislation. Presumably, if she were to be elected, she’d call on him to guide the budget allocation for this “buyback,” which rights activists say is a misnomer because the government never owned those firearms in the first place.
With an estimated 15 million-plus such firearms in circulation, that might put a strain on the federal budget. Things could become even worse if Congress decided to adopt the definition of a “semiautomatic assault rifle” that is now law in Washington State under provisions of Initiative 1639. That measure defined a gun which does not really exist by declaring any self-loading rifle that operates at least partly on recoil to chamber a fresh cartridge is an “assault rifle.” The definition includes every .22-caliber self-loader such as the Ruger 10/22 and Marlin Model 60 or Remington’s classic Nylon 66.
Provisions of that measure are currently being challenged in U.S. District Court by the Second Amendment Foundation and National Rifle Association. SAF’s sister organization, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, opposed the initiative when it was on the ballot in 2018.
