Gun control advocates have long been coy about their actual agenda. They’ve given the public platitudes about “compromise” and “reasonable regulation,” and they’ve taken pains to assure us that “nobody’s coming for your guns.” Then Beto O’Rourke went and spilled the beans on live television. He wasn’t jumping the gun. He was just dumb enough to say it out loud.
In doing so, he conveniently left the door open for Joe Biden to step in with his own plan, which he’s claiming to be moderate in comparison. It’s not. Under the Biden scheme, anyone owning an “assault weapon” will have two choices: sell it back to the government or register it.
I’m not clear how I can sell something back to the government when they never owned it in the first place. I can guarantee that any such “buyback” will only offer a fraction of most weapons’ value, which raises certain 5th Amendment concerns.
But it’s the registry that’s the real issue. The only way to keep existing firearms will be to register them under the National Firearms Act. That’s the system for tracking a small subset of weapons including machine guns and silencers. It costs $200/weapon and current approval times are 10-12 months.
The first problem with this is the idea that someone will have to pay a punitive tax on property they purchased lawfully and in good faith. The second is that the scheme will make registration impossible. The NFA branch has a set number of examiners. Pour tens of millions of new applications into that pool, and turnaround times will be measured in years.
This amounts to a de facto ban, as any such law will have a time limit for compliance that can’t be met, no matter how hard people try.
Furthermore, the current registry (which is a very small subset of guns) is rife with errors. In a 1995 hearing, Tom Busey of the NFA testified that the error rate for the machine gun registry was over 50%. People have been arrested, and their property has been seized because of those errors. This whole plan is one big fiasco that’s going to get innocent people in real trouble, and it’s not going to do a thing to reduce violent crime.
Of course, Biden knows it. This isn’t about public safety, and it never has been. It’s about banning guns and punishing those who own them. At least the agenda is now out in the open for the public to see.