A Washington Post columnist is calling for the United States government to hold a gun “buyback” for millions of privately owned firearms, even though it’s impossible for the government to “buy back” something it never owned.
Eugene Robinson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “Meanwhile, there are 300 million guns in this country. And so a real gun debate has to look at that fact: 300 million guns. And we need, you know, to look at what was done in a place like Australia, where they had a gun buyback.”
Robinson left out the part about Australia’s “buyback” being a forced mass confiscation that was, while monetarily compensated, imposed with the threat of serious jail time for those who didn’t participate. He also left out the fact that even studies done by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research have shown that “buyback” programs have little ability to prevent gun violence.
Or perhaps those facts simply don’t fit in well with Robinson’s anti-gun narrative—a narrative that typically favors fake news over real facts.
