So this is the new “Obama’s gonna take all your guns!!1!” trope.
Which of course he didn’t. Either of the times the GOP leaders said he would. And they knew it. It was just to create hysteria among their base.
Yep, though the gun manufacturers, via the NRA, probably drive that one. They LOVE it when a Democrat is in office because they can say that and watch gun sales rise.
I’m convinced they also love shootings, or at least did, for similar reasons - I’m sure, for a while, gun owners worried this latest shooting might be the one that generates new restrictions on gun purchases, so out they went to buy. At this point I don’t think they have anything to worry about; we as a country seem to have decided mass shootings are Just Great, so that little fear probably doesn’t work as well any more.
Let’s never forget the NRA’s solution to school shootings, after Newtown, was literally, “More guns in schools.”
It wasn’t for lack of trying though, because Obama did call for and back legislation to ban certain scary guns. Their attempts at the taking of guns simply failed the standard legislative process. Many of you probably weren’t of voting age at the time, but this process of attempting to take the guns actually did happen during the Obama presidency.
I was of voting age in 2008. Banning or heavily regulating certain types of guns is not the same as sending the national guard into every home in the US to search for and confiscate them, which is exactly what conservatives have been saying will happen for at least a decade now. Iirc trump banned some kind of bump-stock-adjacent device, but I don’t recall any gangs of roving feds going door to door to round up all the ones that have already been purchased.
Let me make sure I’ve got what you’re saying correct:
Banning or heavily regulating guns that people already legally own, guns that have been widely considered a constitutional right for >75 years, is not the same as “taking your guns”, is that correct? Would it be fair to say that they only thing you would consider to be “taking your guns” would be house-to-house confiscation of all firearms in private hands?
In re: bump stocks - it turns out that a lot of people that purchased them (and forced reset triggers, which are a similar concept) got letters from the ATF telling them that they had to turn them in or destroy them. Because, see, the ATF could just force the companies that sold them to disclose customer records, which means yeah, they could come to your door and take it. Unless you paid cash at a gun store, there’s an electronic trail, and the ATF followed it for a whoooooooole lot of people. Continuing to keep one that you purchased legally at the time? That’s a felony, because the ATF has re-classified them as machine guns, which means you can’t own one since they were produced post-ban, and there’s no way to make it legal. (Currently, there’s an appeals court that has ruled the ban illegal, but we’ll have to see how that plays out.)
Moving the goalposts, not allowed. I will return the discussion back to course.
Banning of guns is what people generally think of as “$politician taking the guns” and is what drives 2A voters to vote against $politician. In the above discussion we were discussing Obama, and he did in fact do what I said he did.
