Beto was honest about taking guns, and that’s why Joe Biden’s gun plan is dead on arrival

Former Vice President Joe Biden has a plan for gun control.

It certainly isn’t the most radical plan out there. He wants to expand the list of crimes for which convicts can be deprived of their gun rights to include misdemeanor hate crimes. He also wants to create a new voluntary gun purchase program. (Such programs are often mistakenly referred to as “buy-backs,” but that syntax falsely implies that the government ever owned any of the guns in the first place.) These programs are usually a harmless waste of money so long as they remain voluntary. But they are a waste.

Most importantly, Biden wants to create a national gun registry. This is where he is sure to meet the most resistance, and rightly so.

The reason is that no sane gun owner will want his or her name on a gun registry after listening to this year’s Democratic candidates on the trail.

It’s not just that Democrats now openly talk of packing the Supreme Court and abolishing the Second Amendment, by hook or by crook. It’s also that specific Democrats, Beto O’Rourke especially, have clarified and confirmed the real reason for creating such registries. A gun registry is the precursor to a mass gun confiscation. Gun owners are not paranoid for taking Democrats’ promises literally on this topic.

O’Rourke’s rhetoric has been crystal clear. “Hell yes,” he announced to the nation’s gun owners in an early September debate. “We are going to take your AR-15.” His promise to cancel the Second Amendment rights of millions of gun owners was met with raucous cheers and applause from a crowd of politically active Democrats. Game, set, match.

Gun owners, including those who own the nation’s most popular sport rifle, will take O’Rourke at his word. Knowing that their own gun poses no threat and that those who are a threat will never report or turn in their guns anyway, they will rightly see a registry or a so-called “buy-back” as the scam that it is. No matter who wins the current primary, Democrats in the future will be seeking to confiscate guns. They will need a national gun registration program in order to determine who has them.

Gun violence in the U.S. is a small and ever-diminishing problem, but the media give the opposite impression. Last year, according to the FBI, there were approximately 10,265 gun murders in the U.S., down 6% year over year. Of these, only 297, just 4.2% of the gun killings where the type of gun was specified, were reported as committed with any sort of rifle, let alone an AR-15.

Gun control supporters cannot explain why the rate of gun homicides in a given state tends to be unrelated to that state’s gun control policy. Your odds of being shot and killed in heavily armed states such as Texas (3.33 gun homicides per 100,000 residents in 2018) and Idaho (1.08 per 100,000) were significantly lower last year than in Maryland (6.42) or Illinois (5.56), despite vastly different approaches to gun regulation. In fact, the rate of gun murders in Texas was not much higher than that in California (2.98 gun murders per 100,000), and the two are nearly identical in overall murder rates. Some states with rigid gun control are also very safe (for example, New York at 1.60 gun killings per 100,000), but clearly other factors are determinant.

In short, Democrats have engaged this issue in bad faith for far too long to be able to win gun owners’ trust now. Biden has a plan, but Beto already showed why it won’t work.