2020 Democrats continue to display disdain for Middle America

Gunshots ring out like a war zone, one right after the other in a sporadic pattern of near-deafening blasts.

I’ll never forget the many evenings I spent sitting on that wooden bench, sipping my off-brand root beer, and watching my dad and grandfather take on bright orange clay birds one by one, week after week.

Blast after bang and disks shattering everywhere, the only fear being my dad’s of not scoring a perfect 25, the only bloodbath being the relentless Wisconsin mosquitoes viciously attacking my bare legs.

Even as a child in grade school, before joining the league’s skeet-shooting team, I remember coming to the elementary conclusion that this must be the safest place on Earth. And I say “elementary” by virtue of its simple profundity, not for its being ill-founded. For, I reasoned, if a rogue, lawless shooter took aim at a bystander, he would certainly have been gunned down by countless law-abiding gun-owners before he could fire a second round. Indeed, the security I felt as I sat there sipping my soda was directly proportional to the number of firearms within my view and the smoky scent of gunpowder filling the air, not in spite of it. It made sense.

My many fond memories at the conservation league, where my dad taught me to shoot and where I took hunter’s safety lessons, reflect what I know to be the reality of sportsmen in the Midwest.

Their gravest crime is the occasional rolling stop, and yet these gun-owners would sooner go to jail than hand over any of their firearms to anyone, particularly the federal government, or take a class every five years to obtain a license for a rifle they’ve been safely and legally discharging for half a century. And yet that could realistically be the choice for them if any one of several Democratic contenders wins back the White House in 2020.

This week, 2020 Democratic hopeful Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., put forth his gun control plan, which includes banning certain types of assault weapons. Although undefined by Booker, “assault weapon” often means most semi-automatic guns, or firearms that discharge each time the trigger is pulled. Booker would also force current owners to give up such guns in a federal buyback program, or else be thrown in prison. His plan also includes mandatory gun licenses that only last five years, obtained through undergoing universal background checks and fingerprint submissions.

In an interview with CBS News’ John Dickerson on Monday, Dickerson noted this license proposal “make[s] it more difficult for honorable gun owner to engage in their Second Amendment right,” which Booker promptly and arrogantly dismissed.

“We know that this is not a plan that any law-abiding gun owner should be concerned about,” Booker said. “The people who should be concerned are … the people who want to break the law, gun runners and criminals.”

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., has introduced similar proposals. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., has said she would take executive action if Congress would not “get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws” after 100 days if she were to take the Oval Office.

These teeth-baring, stop-Trump-at-all-cost Democrats purport to fight for the average American and for “the least of these,” as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, put it in an effort to win over religious undecideds at a Mississippi town hall event in March. All the while, they kowtow relentlessly to the most radical of white urban elites. They adopt largely similar tones to each other, proclaiming, as Harris tweeted, “Our party is not white or Black…Hispanic or Asian…immigrant or indigenous. It is all of us. This is our Party. This is the America we believe in.” They offer these platitudes all while shaking their proverbial fists at the nonwoke in the Rust Belt as if to shout, “You don’t belong in our America!”

Their problem is that this law-abiding protectorate of the Second Amendment is not confined to a solitary Podunk town in rural Wisconsin. And in broad-brushing the vast network of respectable men and women in Middle America as bloodthirsty, child-hating enemies of democracy, these far-left Democrats are overplaying their hand and proving once again their utter disdain for half the electorate. For proof, look no further than their equally ardent hatred of the Electoral College, religious private education, and any hard-working devotees of capitalism.

These things are abhorrent to the Left, and if you believe in them to any degree, so are you.

They don’t just want your vote. They want your allegiance. And until you give it to them, you’re simply in their way to a brighter, more perfect, unarmed America.

Those who are willing to learn from history, however, will reflect on the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton wasn’t nearly as opposed to the Midwest’s way of life as this group of 2020 Democratic hopefuls. But she ignored that voting bloc all the same, regarding them as insignificant.

And she lost.

Kylee Zempel (@KyleeZempel) is a copy editor for the Washington Examiner Magazine and a former travel editor at National Geographic.