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Biden and Harris Both Called for Mandatory Buyback of 20 Million 'Assault Weapons,' Here's What Happens When People Obey

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Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have signaled their support for a mandatory “buyback” of the estimated 20 million so-called assault rifles across the country, but results internationally have shown what such a drastic move might ultimately look like.

First off, a government cannot “buy back” something that it never owned in the first place. Language like this only disguises something evil by putting a nice rhetorical spin on it. A mandatory “buyback” equals confiscation. Gun confiscation is draconian and evil. What do communists do after seizing power? They seize guns from private owners.

Second, the only thing that politicians in Washington with private security forces could accomplish with such drastic measures would be to leave citizens who did comply helpless to face either criminal mobs or tyrannical government unarmed. That would leave Americans at a fork in the road. We’ll get to that fork in the road later.

Both Biden and Harris have endorsed gun confiscation as a means to disarm people who don’t have the luxury of heavily armed security. On their campaign website, they stated quite plainly they would rid the world of “assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”

“Biden will also institute a program to buy back weapons of war currently on our streets. This will give individuals who now possess assault weapons or high-capacity magazines two options: sell the weapons to the government, or register them under the National Firearms Act,” the website said.

It also floated creating “an effective program to ensure individuals who become prohibited from possessing firearms relinquish their weapons,” while also vowing to outlaw online sales, reduce “stockpiling” and expand “red flag” laws.

Most troubling, though, was Biden’s “buyback” proposal, which he talked about on the campaign trail.

In 2019, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked him, “So, to gun owners out there who say, well, a Biden administration means they’re going to come for my guns?”

“Bingo. You’re right if you have an assault weapon,” Biden responded. “The fact of the matter is, they should be illegal, period.”

Biden went on to say he would “institute a national buyback program, and I would move it in the direction of making sure that that in fact is what we try to do, get them off the street.”



During the second Democratic primary debate, he indicated that gun owners wouldn’t have a choice in the matter.

“I’m also the only guy that got assault weapons banned, banned, and the number of clips in a gun banned,” Biden said. “And so, folks, look, and I would buy back those weapons. We already started talking about that. We tried to get it done. I think it can be done. And it should be demanded that we do it, and that’s a good expenditure of money.” (Emphasis added.)

Harris voiced her support for gun confiscation in a 2019 appearance on NBC’s “Tonight Show” before she dropped out of the Democratic primary race.

During a question-and-answer segment, an audience member asked if she supported a “mandatory buyback” of “assault weapons.”

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“I do believe that we need to do buybacks, and I’ll tell you why,” Harris said.



“First of all, let’s be clear about what assault weapons are. They have been designed to kill a lot of human beings quickly. … A buyback program is a good idea. Now we need to do it the right way. And part of that has to be, you know, buy back and give people their value, the financial value of what they have and not just take things from people that have value without compensating them. We need to do it the right way.”

Fox News reported Wednesday that following mass shootings in Georgia and Colorado over the last week, the Biden administration seems primed to come for Americans’ guns. Harris and aides to Biden are pushing the idea of confiscation with the timing apparently right, the report said, although it said Biden does not currently support “mandatory gun buybacks.”

That doesn’t mean we’re suddenly sitting ducks, though. Let’s take a look at how a so-called buyback of weapons in 2019 went in the wake of the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

After a madman went on a rampage in March of that year, the government ordered certain weapons to be turned in and their owners reimbursed. According to TVNZ, an estimated 100,000 New Zealanders refused to turn in their guns.

An estimated 56,000 banned firearms were turned in, leading New Zealand’s Council of Licensed Firearms Owners to call the confiscation program an “unmitigated failure,” The Washington Post reported.

Something else did occur, though, that the country’s leftist lawmakers probably weren’t bright enough to see coming: Gun deaths went up. Radio New Zealand reported “the highest rates of gun crime and deaths involving firearms for nearly 10 years” in 2019.

Is that any surprise?

Criminals don’t follow gun laws, which is what makes them criminals. Would those people perhaps have felt a little emboldened by being under the impression that their country’s law-abiding citizens had largely complied and rendered themselves defenseless? Perhaps.

Enough of them apparently did so to drive a spike in gun crimes and deaths. That leads us back to our fork in the road.

Would you turn in your gun if the government ordered a mandatory "buyback"?

The same would likely happen in this country were people to turn in their guns. Americans could either surrender to socialist rule or decide to breathe freely. It’s likely more than one-third of Americans — as was the case in New Zealand — would refuse to comply with a draconian gun confiscation order. Would you hand over your only way to protect yourself to someone like Joe Biden?

We’d likely see a situation here where millions of people would by definition be made criminals overnight — and many willingly so. People would do so in order to defend themselves and their families. Sweeping a hallway in your home filled with a band of criminals is preferable to being victimized by them in your bed.

Americans must hold on to our firearms. They are our last line of defense against both tyrants and criminals.

If New Zealand is to be viewed as any sort of metric, they can’t take all of our guns. Odds are, they probably wouldn’t even try.

But something bold and stupid is coming down the pipeline. Americans had better be ready to oppose it, lest we all be left vulnerable to the wolves of the world.

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Johnathan Jones has worked as a reporter, an editor, and producer in radio, television and digital media.
Johnathan "Kipp" Jones has worked as an editor and producer in radio and television. He is a proud husband and father.




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