Democrat Presidential hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the full-flip career politician from New York who was pro-gun as a congresswoman from her district but went full throttle anti-gun when she was elected to the U.S. Senate, says she would push a “buy-back” program for so-called “assault weapons” and for felony charges against those who refused to comply.
Appearing 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.”
Over the weekend, appearing on ABC This Week, 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.”
Gillibrand 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.”
But that’s a new world that did not exist a generation ago, when instead of telling school students to “shelter in place,” many high schools still had rifle teams. There were no school shootings, team members brought their rifles to school and even got their photos in the school yearbook.
In many states, autumn would see teens with guns in their cars or trucks used for hunting in the afternoons and evenings following school. Nobody got shot then, either.
Townhall noted the other day 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 one of those candidates. She 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 break the federal budget. It would be 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.”
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.
