Going to Extremes Against Guns

By Kimberley A. Strassel,

Threatening to take voters’ firearms away isn’t the way to beat Donald Trump..

Democrats insist there’s no more urgent job than ensuring Donald Trump is a one-term president. Which is odd, given how hard they are simultaneously working to alienate the voters they most need to make that happen. See this week’s debate on gun control.

The weekend’s shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, inspired the entire liberal-media complex to chant “gun control,” reflexively and predictably. A favorite demand is to expand background checks—never mind that these mass shooters, and those of recent years, bought their guns legally and therefore passed such checks. Another is an “assault weapons” ban—never mind that “assault” weapons function in the same way as tens of millions of other semi-automatic rifles that would remain in circulation.

But the Democratic presidential candidates went further. It is not enough, they insisted, to expand background checks or limit types of firearms going forward. What is needed is to take guns away and to make it harder for law-abiding Americans to own them. They at least get credit for being more honest about the left’s gun intentions.

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