”Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”  So exclaimed Beto O’Rourke during the recent Democratic primary debate, endorsing the idea of mandatory buy-backs of assault weapons. It has become “the newest purity test” for Democratic candidates, but have they thought about the consequences of enforcing such a policy?

“There could be as many as ten million so-called assault weapons in private hands in the US, and moves to confiscate them would be fiercely opposed. At the very least it would require suspending Americans’ constitutional right to trial by jury, as it’s all too easy to imagine juries in, say, rural Montana refusing to convict firearms violators in the same way as “Massachusetts juries in the 1850s often refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act”. It could also lead to bloodshed.

“Gun control advocates scoff at the prospect of armed resistance, pointing out that defiant citizens would be vastly outgunned by the federal government. But remember the Waco siege in 1993, when the storming of a religious sect’s compound in Texas by the FBI led to the deaths of 82 people. Are the politicians advocating mass gun confiscations willing to be held “liable for the carnage that would result”?   (James Bovard, The American Conservative).

My comment:  We already have carnage, Mr. Bovard, without any attempt at confiscation, and the deaths are observed with indifference by the gun advocates, who care nothing for the bloodshed.  So much for Sunday church.

I was born in England. My father had a hunting gun (and a license for it) which was locked up when not in use.  Every three months a policeman visited to check that the weapon was under lock and key.  This rule never stopped my father from legal hunting. He was obeying a sensible safety law.

The foreign way allows reasonable people to have their hunting, and violent criminals and armed bullies cannot harm the public, which they do on a daily basis in America.  Tomorrow I will set out the actions needed to restore civilized life to America in so far as guns are concerned.