The Article below was published in Vol. 135, Issue 1 of the Lake Forest College Stentor on September 20, 2019
By Nathaniel Bodnar ‘21
Staff Writer
The defining moment of the latest Democratic debate was when Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) said, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15 and your AK-47.” He turned gun confiscation from a strawman argument that the right used against the left, to a serious policy proposal. O’Rourke proposed mandatory gun buybacks to get AR-15s off the street. Most importantly, this policy will not be effective unless he is willing to enforce it with a threat of violence, such as federal law enforcement.
To start, a “mandatory buyback” is a contradictory phrase. The act of buying something is a consensual agreement. If it is mandatory and enforced by the federal government, it can’t be completely consensual because the threat of force is used as coercion. Also, “buyback” is a misleading concept. The government can’t buy back guns because they never owned those guns.
New Zealand is currently having a gun “buyback” and it’s failing. According to NPR, as of September 13, there had been just over 19,000 guns turned into the police. This hasn’t done much, as PBS estimated that there are currently 175,000 illegal weapons out of the 1.5 million legal ones in New Zealand. This is around a ten percent compliance rate. This program has not been overly successful, though the citizens of New Zealand have until December 20 to turn in their guns without penalty.
In the US, such a program would be even harder to pull off. NSSF, the firearms industry trade association, said that in 2018 there were over 16 million “modern sporting rifles,” which is the category the AR-15 is in. The US won’t beat New Zealand’s compliance rate with a buyback program. The US has a much stronger gun culture that will be more resistant to giving up their guns. A popular slogan in American gun culture is “Molon Labe,” which translates to “come and take them.” The slogan comes from King Leonidas I of Sparta after Xerxes I of Persia asked the Spartans to give up their weapons. The people with that attitude are not just going to turn in their guns. To truly “take those guns off the streets,” there would have to be millions of raids across the country. If those raids don’t happen, there will still be millions of AR-15s on the streets.
A “mandatory buyback” is a feel-good policy that will not produce results. There are far too many AR-15s in the US to take them off the streets. The result is that the weapons taken are currently in the hands of the people least likely to commit crimes with them. The mandatory aspect of the proposal is likely to be largely unenforced, but it will alienate the millions of Americans who currently own the weapon. This policy won’t work; it is mislabeled to mislead the average American and will hurt the Democrats in the 2020 campaign if it were to be on the platform. Its intention is bold and commendable, but it won’t achieve its goal and it isn’t worth pursuing.
Nathaniel Bodnar can be reached at bodnarnm@lakeforest.edu.
