HAMMER: I Will Never, Ever Let The Government ‘Buy Back’ My ‘Assault Weapon’

Yesterday, my Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh wrote a terrific column in which he accurately noted that a prospective mandatory gun "buy back" program — such as that which hapless former Rep. Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke (D-TX) has harrowingly proposed for so-called "assault weapons," on the infinitesimal chance America is so doomed that the bumbling bloviator is elected president — is "just another name for confiscation." As Matt succinctly put it, "It's a bit like calling armed robbery a 'compelled donation.' The latter characterization wouldn't hold up in a court of law, and the 'buy back' ruse shouldn't hold up in the court of public opinion."

Of course, to buy something "back" would be to linguistically imply that the underlying item in question was in the possession of the purchaser to begin with. That is factually false in the case of mandatory gun "buy back" programs — the overwhelming majority of gun owners in the United States acquire their weapons via mutually beneficial transactions with private merchants.

But not only is it factually false to suggest that the government ever owned our guns in the first place — it is also logically perverse in the extreme. As the Constitution's Framers understood quite well, a free citizenry possesses firearms precisely to serve as a meaningful civilian check on the power of the state and to disincentivize the government from ever overreaching in tyrannical, authoritarian fashion. Viewed from this perspective, so-called "assault weapons" are nothing less than the 21st-century technological analogues of the single-shot muskets that served the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord.