Several police and other local law-enforcement organizations have said they would ignore a presidential order from Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke to send them into private homes to confiscate firearms.
Back in September, O’Rourke responded, “Hell, yes,” to a question at a Democratic Party presidential debate about whether he would, as president, take guns away from Americans, including those who have committed no crime.
Then, last week, O’Rourke told MSNBC that he would order “law enforcement to recover” guns from those who defy his buy-back plan. This promise — that he would be dispatching police officers and sheriffs to confiscate firearms — did not sit well with many of those representing the officers who would be expected to carry out such an order.
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The Washington Free Beacon interviewed several leaders of groups who represent officers, such as the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). The FOP is the nation’s largest police union. It represents more than 330,000 law-enforcement officers. FOP Executive Director Jim Pasco told the Beacon, “Mr. O’Rourke may not be aware that state and local police officers (who comprise more than 90 percent of all police in the U.S.) receive their orders from their local jurisdictions — not from the federal government. Further, any such legislation, if it passed, would no doubt be vigorously litigated with a view to its apparent inconsistency with the Second Amendment.”
One sheriff in O’Rourke’s home state of Texas, AJ Louderback, said he would refuse to obey such an order from a President O’Rourke. “I think he’s seriously misjudging the law-enforcement response to what he wants to do. Many sheriffs would not comply.”
O’Rourke has suffered some friction with local law enforcement in Texas since his unsuccessful U.S. Senate race against Senator Ted Cruz. In a debate with Cruz, O’Rourke said he did not like the “system” of searching a person, stopping a person, and even “shooting that person” just based on the “color of their skin.”
When Cruz challenged O’Rourke during the debate, O’Rourke protested that he was not criticizing police officers (but one wonders who else would be perpetrating such gross civil liberties violations that O’Rourke described other than police).
Other local law-enforcement officers were critical of O’Rourke’s lack of support for the “men and women at our borders who are trying to disarm violent drug cartels and human traffickers in the real world, instead of fantasizing about using America’s police to confiscate rifles from ranchers in Texas.”
Many Democrats have expressed displeasure at O’Rourke’s avowed intention to disarm law-abiding American citizens, but one wonders if their displeasure is more that he spoke too plainly, rather than having any actual opposition to his gun-confiscation goals.
For example, former Vice President Joe Biden said, “Over 90 percent of the American people think we have to get assault weapons off the street period.” Times have changed, Biden argued, and now public opinion favors stricter gun control. In other words, constitutional rights only exist at the pleasure of the majority?
When asked the next day after the debate if he believed Americans would actually comply with his intention to confiscate certain guns, O’Rourke said he believed most would. He added that he did not intend to have a federal door-to-door confiscation of weapons, but would work with local police chiefs to develop a plan to take away guns.
Now, we have heard the plan. O’Rourke plans to issue an executive order (were he to be actually elected president) to local law enforcement to go get the guns. But presidential executive orders can only be directed at persons in the executive branch of the federal government, not local and state governments. This is not 1930s Germany, where Adolf Hitler seized not only firearms, but control of local law enforcement via his creation of the notorious Gestapo.
O’Rourke is not only attacking the rights of gun owners, but the right of Christian churches (and for that matter, any religious organization, including Muslims and Jews) to express their opinions of moral issues. In a recent CNN town hall, O’Rourke said he would revoke the tax-exempt status for any religious organization that opposed same-sex “marriage.”
“There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone … that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us.”
Apparently, O’Rourke has as little regard for the First Amendment as he does the Second Amendment, and by thinking he can issue orders to local police departments and local sheriffs, he doesn’t have any regard for the 10th Amendment, either.
This has caused some to suggest Beto should add an n and an i in his name, between the e and the t.
Steve Byas is a university history and government instructor and author of the book History’s Greatest Libels. He can be contacted at [email protected].
