In the long history of forgotten presidential hopefuls who ran aground due to their misunderstandings of America it is hard find a more stupefying example than Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). Swalwell has decided that threatening to take away a fundamental civil right is a smart campaign platform.
“I see lawmakers who love their guns more than they love our kids.... I am ready to solve these problems. I am running for the President of the United States,” said Swalwell, on the “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Monday, just before announcing that he’d begin his campaign in Florida with a townhall event near Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Swalwell opted not to mention the school resource officer who wimped out and didn’t go into the school to stop the murderer. He also didn’t mention all of the major blunders with the bureaucracy at every level as they failed to stop the killer again and again.
Instead, Swalwell said we need an Australian (and now New Zealand) type of gun confiscation right here in the land of the free and home of the brave. He said he is all for “banning and buying back all 15 million of the ‘assault weapons’ out there.”
Just how Swalwell is defining the political term “assault weapon” is hard to say. The only way to define what supposedly fits into this ever-expanding pejorative is by what a particular assault-weapons ban says. Likely, he doesn’t even know as he has shown his ignorance on this issue before.
“[W]e should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons,” wrote Swalwell last year in an opinion piece for USA Today.
Then, to substantiate his claim that such a national gun confiscation is constitutional, Swalwell opined that the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t declared so-called “assault weapons” to be protected by the Second Amendment. He made this claim by noting that when the “Supreme Court held in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that this right ‘is not unlimited’ and is ‘not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.’”
While it is clearly true that there are reasonable restrictions placed on every right, Swalwell’s claim stretches this fact to absurdity—as semiautomatic firearms are commonly owned and are easily the most popular type of firearm sold today. The case he is citing—Heller v.D.C.(2008)—also clearly says that the Second Amendment protects guns in “common use.”
Soon after writing that opinion piece, Swalwell told NBC News: “I’d make sure we get rid of detachable magazines and the pistol grip—to me that’s the feature that make it most deadly.”
A pistol grip might be more comfortable for some, and it can make it more difficult for an attacker to get a firearm away from someone. This is one reason why AR15s and other common semiautomatic rifles are ideal for home defense. But just how do pistol grips make a rifle more “deadly”?
As for detachable magazines, Swalwell clearly doesn’t have a clue how common they are with rifles and pistols—or maybe he just doesn’t care. He thinks it’s smart politics to demonize and vilify America’s 100 million-plus gun owners.
Last month Swalwell even tried to pretend to be pro-Second Amendment while hanging out with Shannon Watts, the founder of anti-gun group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, at an event with veterans. He tweeted: “I love to shoot at the range and hang with our local vets. So we combined those today, thanks to help from @ACSOSheriffs. Was joined by @MomsDemandfounder, @shannonrwatts—an advocate for gun safety, and also a lover of our cops & vets. We had a great time!”
Gun safety is gun confiscation to Swalwell.
Most-Revealing Anti-Freedom Quote of the Week
“I’m not afraid of this guy. I’m not afraid of the NRA. I’m not afraid. No fear. #EndGunViolence” –A Tweet from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) as he retweeted a threatening Tweet from someone and tried to tie it to the NRA.
Pro-Freedom Quote of the Week
Dana Loesch retweeted Swalwell’s Tweet and said: “Where in the world do you get that this nut job is the NRA? Another incredibly reckless accusation from someone who once said they’d nuke law-abiding gun owners if they didn’t turn in their firearms.”
