To some, his remarks sounded like a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. But within minutes of the debate ending, his campaign was marketing pre-printed tee-shirts bearing his carefully rehearsed sound bite.
The framers of America's Constitution enshrined the right to keep and bear arms as the Second Amendment in its Bill of Rights because guns were the most tangible guarantee of power in the hands of the people. This is precisely why progressive Democrats, who want all power in the hands of government, hate gun rights.
But until recently, Democrats trod carefully on the issue of guns. They limited their lust for power to the big cities they ruled, where regulations made the keeping and bearing of arms difficult.
Democrats faced problems restricting guns elsewhere. They lacked the votes to amend the Second Amendment out of existence.
They depended on white, blue-collar, hunter-gun-owning and working-class voters to get elected. But lately Democrats have largely abandoned the white working class.
Decades ago, liberal Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) decided the only way to banish a hundred million American firearms would be for police and soldiers to kick down people's doors in the middle of the night. This could touch off a revolution, as the British realized after they failed to confiscate colonists' gunpowder and bullets at Lexington and Concord. This cost of gun control, said Church, was simply too great to pay. America won its independence and liberty only because its people were armed. (But this year Australia again conducted surprise raids that confiscated more than 400 firearms.)
Yet now leftist Democrats have decided that 300 million firearms can be taken from 43 percent of the American people, starting with so-called "assault rifles" such as the AR-15. President Barack Obama tried to do this and became the greatest gun salesman in American history. But a RAND Corporation study found all such attempts at gun control failed to reduce crime or violence.
Today's Democrat far-left gun grab has boosted gun sales by an additional 15 percent because Democrats have largely dropped any pretense of wanting only a few kinds of firearms. It is now obvious they aim to confiscate every civilian rifle, shotgun and handgun. Gun control is not really about guns, but about control. Democrats cannot impose an all-powerful socialist dictatorship while citizens remain armed.
Democrats are betting on the stupidity and ignorance of the Millennial generation (averaging six I.Q. points lower than previous generations) to give away our Constitutional gun rights in the wake of a few heavily publicized shootings. The liberal media conceal how many of these shooters are actually leftists – e.g., the El Paso shooter is a radical eco-terrorist; the Dayton shooter was a Marxist-socialist, a Satanist, and a supporter of Elizabeth Warren and the leftist terrorist group Antifa.
And now the Democratic Party and its media comrades seek to gain power from atrocities committed by their fellow leftists. Many Americans smell this deception, which is why the latest polls by Quinnipiac and ABC-Washington Post show concocted "support" for more gun control falling by an average of 6 points.
Democrats are quick to call for seizing "assault rifles," but they usually duck and run when asked to define this weapon. A recent exception was former Vice President Joe Biden, who declared that an "assault rifle" was any gun that had "more than one bullet in its magazine."
In other words, this leading Democratic candidate for president would confiscate every semi-automatic rifle or handgun, and even any revolver or weapon with a clip capable of carrying more than one bullet. He would outlaw the vast majority of all firearms owned by Americans. And Biden is the most "moderate" of Democratic candidates. His running mate will inevitably be to his left, and if Biden is elected would be only a heartbeat away from completely disarming America.
Meanwhile, San Francisco has declared the National Rifle Association a "domestic terrorist organization," and 28 percent of Democrats tell Rasmussen it should be illegal to be an NRA member. But the Democratic masked shock troops of terrorist Antifa are rapidly arming, according to the New Republic, and will be ready to take control when law-abiding Americans are disarmed by dishonest, easily abused "red flag" laws.
We should, however, disarm mentally ill megalomaniac Democrat politicians and other leftists obsessed with confiscating the constitutional rights of fellow Americans.
