Beto O’Rourke by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

Hell yes, he wants to take your gun. That’s Robert “Beto” O’Rourke’s words. Not mine.

What’s more, if you don’t comply, then he’s more than happy to send authorities to your home in order to force you to give it up.

That’s what O’Rourke told Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe after last night’s debate. Scarborough proposed a situation where a person who legally purchased their AR-15 doesn’t want to participate in a mandatory buyback and refuses to give up the rifle. O’Rourke responded simply.

You’ll get a visit from law enforcement.

“There have to be consequences,” said O’Rourke on people not following the laws he plans to set.

“In that case, I think there would be a visit by law enforcement to recover that firearm and to make sure that it is purchased — bought back — so that it cannot be potentially used against somebody else,” he continued.

https://twitter.com/alx/status/1184455929049370624?s=20

Perhaps O’Rourke doesn’t understand what he’s saying here, or understand the magnitude of what he’s proposing.

By estimation, there are around five million AR-15’s privately owned by Americans. They aren’t “out on the street” as Senator Kamala Harris said last night. They’re safely kept in the homes of legal gun owners, but I digress.

Should O’Rourke become President by some demonic miracle, and should Congress pass a ban on AR-15’s by that same dark miracle, then doubtless there would be thousands who partake in the buyback program.

But that’s thousands, and you need millions to do so. The problem is that millions of people out there won’t give up their guns. They’ll likely keep them safe and hidden, in hopes that one day they’ll become legal again. It’s happened before.

I’ve had countless conversations with gun owners about what they’d do if it ever became illegal to own an AR-15, or even a gun in general. Everyone seems to have a plan on how they would hide their gun. I believe many of them would be successful if it ever came down to it.

O’Rourke would have many people who would defy his law. In order to make sure everyone complies with his new law, he’d have to go door to door in order to make sure no one has a rifle.

There’s just one problem.

You can’t search a home without a warrant, and you’d have to search a lot of homes. That’d mean a lot of warrants and a lot of time getting said warrants because cases for probable cause have to be made. Doing so without a warrant is a violation of the 4th Amendment.

Since we in the United States don’t have to register our guns, the government has no way to know who does and doesn’t own a gun. Even if they see on social media that an individual does have one, that may just be the one they saw. There’s no telling how many that individual may own.

Long story short, if O’Rourke wanted to really enforce his mandatory buyback program, he’d have to somehow do away with the 4th Amendment and search door to door for guns he may not find anyway due to the people hiding them. Even if he does find one by an individual, it may not be the only one he owns.

In summation, O’Rourke’s mandatory buyback program that he’s going to enforce by sending officials to your home is an absolute statist’s pipe dream. A would-be tyrant’s fantasy.