Hillary Clinton Willing to Look Into a Second Amendment-Less America, Like Australia

These anti-gun positions haven't traditionally done the Democratic Party much good.

As Nick Gillespie noted earlier this month, the anti-gun pundit class, in the face of the legal ability to carry weapons increasing along with gun violence hugely decreasing, is for whatever reason more and more willing to boldly suggest a nation without guns.

Today, Hillary Clinton switched from "common sense gun safety" to an apparent call for some sort of mass government forced buyback of at least certain weapons.

Here's the video:

The questioner mistakenly believes there are no more handguns in Australia. And Hillary seems to think there are no legal issues involved in government efforts to restrict gun rights or institute forced buybacks; no mention of the Second Amendment and I suppose in her mind if she gets four years of picked Supreme Court justices, in effect we won't have a Second Amendment. Some sort of mandatory government buyback of weapons is, she said, "worth considering on the national level if that could be arranged."

Now, the actual situation vis a vis guns in Australia isn't as simple as the apparent media image of a nation where the government rose up in anger at gun violence and ensured that no guns exist and then everything got better because of that. (Here's a lot of the legal nitty-gritty.)

Australia is not a country without guns, by any means, and its vaunted gun homicide reductions were on pretty much the same downward trend before its beloved post-buyback new gun law regime in 1996.

But it seems to be true that personal defense is not considered a legitimate reason to be licensed in Australia, whereas the U.S. Supreme Court in Heller declared that self-defense in the home via common weapons is an inviolable constitutional right.   

While it's hard to say what Hillary thought she meant by saying what she said, we see in the minds of her questioner and her fans that Australia has certainly come to mean "land where the government took all the guns."

That might not prove to be an electoral winner for Hillary. (It has been conventional wisdom in her party for the past 15 years that seeming insufficiently respectful of gun rights likely lost Gore the presidency in 2000.) Still, nice of her to make the issue so vivid for voters who care. (Erick Erickson's website has some links to Obama also seeming open to some Australia-style rights violations.)

Voters who do care might want to consider what striving for a gunless America would likely mean, via this Reason TV video: