Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) seems to be struggling to get much traction for his 2020 presidential bid. According to prediction market website PredictIt.org, Booker is currently the eighth most likely Democrat to win the presidential nomination. And in one recent Democratic presidential primary poll that shows former Vice President Joe Biden with a massive 32% lead over socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Booker barely registers with merely 3% support.
In other words, Booker needs a spark — perhaps a spark to energize the increasingly hard-left Democratic Party activist base. In a CNN appearance on Monday, Booker may have tried to generate that spark by offering a (tyrannical and anti-constitutional) paean to the vehemently anti-Second Amendment partisans of the Democratic Party base.
Mikhael Smits of The Washington Free Beacon tweeted Booker’s underlying CNN clip and noted: “Cory Booker won’t say whether he’ll jail Americans who refuse to surrender firearms they lawfully purchased if he’s president.”
As Smits elaborated, CNN anchor Poppy Harlow pressed Booker on whether he agreed with the proposals of his fellow 2020 presidential candidate Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), an anti-gun stalwart, who supports “buy-back programs, where Americans who currently have [certain types of] guns could sell them, essentially, to the government.” As Harlow noted, Swalwell then proposes that if the gun owners “don’t [turn in their weapons] within a certain period of time, they would be prosecuted, thrown in jail.”
Booker prevaricated, initially resorting to the tangential leftist platitude that the “critical thing is I think most Americans agree that these weapons of war should not be on our streets.”
But Harlow was not satisfied. Per Smits:
Harlow again pressed Booker.
“But would you prosecute people?” she asked. “Do you support the government buying them back and if not, potentially people could go to jail if they don’t want to sell them back? Yes or no?”
Booker would not answer the question.
“Again, we should have a law that bans these weapons and we should have a reasonable period in which people can turn in these weapons,” Booker answered. “Right now we have a nation that allows in streets and communities like mine these weapons that should not exist.”
Cory Booker therefore appears to want to throw Americans in jail who do not voluntarily turn in lawfully purchased firearms to their federal government overlords.
Earlier yesterday, Booker unveiled an elaborate gun control plan. Axios reported:
The plan features some of the most progressive measures to combat gun violence proposed by any 2020 candidate. …
The biggest thing in the proposal is a national gun licensing program, which would force Americans to apply for 5-year gun licenses before obtaining a firearm. The process would include fingerprinting, an interview, gun safety courses, and a federal background check.
- It includes a ban on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks.
- It would seek to close loopholes, like the one that allows people on the federal terror watch list to be able to obtain guns.
- It would increase oversight on gun manufacturing, giving more leeway to the Consumer Product Safety Commission to put warnings on firearms and recall them, if necessary.
The Democratic Party activist base is increasingly extremely hostile to Second Amendment rights. In a USA Today op-ed last month, Peter Funt argued that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) ought to be disqualified as a possible 2020 presidential candidate merely because she owns a handgun.