Nobody is talking about taking anyone’s guns away, wingnuts.
Except for . . . the president. Last week, the Washington Post explained “the deal with the Australian gun control law that Obama is talking about”:
In an interview with comedian Marc Maron that aired Monday, President Obama cited Australia’s gun laws as an example the United States should follow. Australia established strict gun control in response to a massacre in Tasmania that left 35 people dead in 1996. Since then, Australia hasn’t witnessed any mass shootings.
“It was just so shocking the entire country said, ‘Well, we’re going to completely change our gun laws’, and they did. And it hasn’t happened since,” Obama said, discussing the shooting deaths of nine people at a historic black church in Charleston last week.
And what did Australia do?
The law banned semi-automatic and automatic rifles and shotguns. It also instituted a mandatory buy-back program for newly banned weapons.
In plainspeak, that’s “confiscation.” Were the United States to do this — and it can’t, because it’s illegal – the federal government would have to confiscate around 150 million firearms (not 40 million, as WaPo suggests). That’s quite the haul given that “nobody is talking about taking anyone’s guns away.” Can you say, “civil war”?
By the way, I’ve always loathed the term “buyback.” Buy back from . . . what exactly? Americans don’t buy their guns from the state; how can the state buy them “back”?