(Article by Dan Zimmerman republished from TheTruthAboutGuns.com)
Those of us who care about the right to keep and bear arms owe him and his pals who signed onto the idea a debt of gratitude we may never be able to fully repay.
“For years liberals have said we’re not coming to take your guns and now Beto O’Rourke has said we’re coming to take your guns,” says Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of “Gunfight: the battle over the right to bear arms in America”. Long after Mr O’Rourke has dropped out of the race, he says, the main pro-gun lobbyist, the National Rifle Association (NRA), will continue to elide Mr O’Rourke’s confiscation plan with the more moderate gun-control proposals of other Democratic candidates. That is liable to boost turnout for pro-gun candidates—including Mr Trump—in 2020.
Democrats have tended to tread carefully on gun-control in order to avoid that prospect. Until recently, they avoided talking about it much in the run-up to elections. Many in the party believed campaigning for gun-control cost them control of the House in 1994 and the presidency in 2000. But even before Mr O’Rourke’s intervention Democrats had been more outspoken on the issue. All the party’s candidates for the presidential nomination say they want to make background checks universal, make it easier to remove guns from people who appear to be unstable, and ban the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Read more at: TheTruthAboutGuns.com