After decades of denying that this was their ultimate goal, Democrats are now more willing to openly state that they want to forcibly take American’s guns away. They like to refer to their proposals by using the euphemism “mandatory buybacks,” but the rest of us should not follow suit. Gun confiscation would be a more accurate term.
Bloomberg‘s Sahil Kapur has a story detailing that as anti-gun sentiment has swept through the 2020 Democratic primary, Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, along with Beto O’Rourke, now support a policy that would require owners of guns vaguely deemed “assault weapons” to “sell” their property to the federal government.
To be clear, any government “purchase” of these guns would be forced, as owners have no choice over whether to turn in their property, nor would there be any sort of negotiation about price. The government would take all the guns regardless of whether owners want to sell them, and provide whatever compensation officials deem fair. No doubt, this would be well below market value.
A look at the terms “buyback” and “confiscate” in the Oxford English Dictionary, shows the latter is clearly much closer to the action being described here.
The dictionary defines buyback as, “originally U.S. the buying-back or repurchase of goods, shares, etc., often by contractual agreement; spec. the repurchase by a company of its own stock, often as a defensive ploy against a takeover bid; frequently attributive.”
In the case of stock buybacks, a company sells shares to investors, and then at some point down the road, uses cash to buy the shares back at an agreed price. In the instance in which Democrats are using it, however, the guns were never owned by the government. Instead, they were legally purchased by individuals who retain ownership. How can the federal government buy back what it never owned?
There are multiple ways that the dictionary defines the verb “confiscate,” and all of them are much closer to the actions being contemplated by Democrats.
The definitions are:
- “To appropriate (private property) to the sovereign or the public treasury by way of penalty.”
- “To deprive (a person) of his property as forfeited to the State.”
- “To forfeit to the sovereign or state.”
- “To seize as if by authority; to take forcible possession of, to appropriate summarily.”
If Democrats were to take guns, they would be seizing private property and having the government take possession, consistent with these definitions.
Some would argue that because the government would offer some compensation to gun owners, it would not qualify as confiscation. But none of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions preclude some sort of payment. And furthermore, any compensation would not be a mutually agreed upon on (note the “contractual agreement” reference in the definition of “buyback”). There would, under the scenario being proposed by Democrats, be millions of Americans who would not want to sell their guns to the government, let alone at the price being offered.
There’s a difference between: 1) walking into a store and purchasing a product at the price it’s being sold for, and 2) seeing a painting on the wall of the store, being told it isn’t for sale, grabbing it anyway, and then tossing some cash on the counter. The first example is commerce, the second is closer to theft.
Democrats have every reason to use softer language to describe their radical positions, but the rest of us should use plain English.
