If DWI Beto Got To Keep His Car, Shouldn't Innocent Gun Owners Get To Keep Their Guns?
No, Beto O’Rourke is probably not going to be able to take your AR-15.
I’m not saying this because of the fact that once our mutual friend Robert Francis gets into the White House, he’s going to find Congress, the courts and the Constitution aren’t as malleable as he thinks they’re going to be.
I’m saying this because of the fact that he has roughly zero chance of getting into the White House in 2020.
In the RealClearPolitics polling average, O’Rourke sits at 3.0 percent. That, believe it or not, is an improvement from the past few months, when the polling aggregate showed him in the twos.
If he goes after your handguns, maybe he’ll make it into the fours. This will invariably progress until he gets to, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your Nerf guns,” which will maybe get him into the sevens.
Not that it’ll make a difference, mind you — Uncle Joe, Pocahontas and Comrade Bernie will still likely be fighting it out at the top, but it’s be good to know that if O’Rourke talks about seizing enough weapons, he can probably get a sufficient number of nanny-staters to propel him into the high single digits. Sort of respectable, wouldn’t you say?
However, let’s assume some sort of miracle occurs.
Let’s assume America decides what it really wants in a leader is a failed indie musician and middling congressman who has the preternatural ability to act earnest and angry at gun owners every time a mass shooting occurs.
Let’s also assume (I know our assumptions are getting pretty far out here) Beto is able to convince Congress to ban and seize certain rifles like the AR-15 and that this ban survives legal scrutiny.
Who is the Beto administration taking these rifles from? Law-abiding Americans who weren’t using them to hurt anyone.
The question, therefore, practically asks itself: What about Beto’s Volvo?
If you’re not familiar with O’Rourke’s origin story, this might take a little bit of explanation. In 1998, during his wayward youth, our Texan friend got himself in a bit of a bother by making the mistake of combining alcohol with a car.
However, he didn’t just get pulled over after drifting out of his lane and fail a sobriety test.
Oh, no; say what you will about him, but Beto does nothing by halves. While driving his Volvo whiffled, O’Rouke managed to get in an accident and — at least according to the police officers who wrote the report — tried to escape.
“State and local police reports obtained by the Chronicle and Express-News show that O’Rourke was driving drunk at what a witness called ‘a high rate of speed’ in a 75 mph zone on Interstate 10 about a mile from the New Mexico border,” the Houston Chronicle reported in August 2018 during O’Rourke’s Senate race against Ted Cruz.
“He lost control and hit a truck, sending his car careening across the center median into oncoming lanes. The witness, who stopped at the scene, later told police that O’Rourke had tried to drive away from the scene.”
“O’Rourke recorded a 0.136 and 0.134 on police breathalyzers, above a blood-alcohol level of 0.10, the state legal limit at the time. He was arrested at the scene and charged with DWI, but completed a court-approved diversion program and had the charges dismissed,” the newspaper added.
O’Rourke, who was 26 at the time of the incident, has insisted that he didn’t try to flee the scene. The officers who were there say otherwise.
“I believe we have contradicting stories here,” Richard Carrera, the investigating officer who arrested O’Rourke, told The Texas Tribune. “I stand by my report.”
He added that he had “no doubt that [O’Rourke] tried to leave the scene.”
I mention all of this because there’s no constitutional amendment codifying your right to own a car. There’s nothing in the Bill of Rights saying that “A well maintained Volvo, being necessary to the mobility of a privileged hipster, the right of the people to keep and bear cars shall not be infringed.”
That’s not because of the fact the Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate solid, quirky Swedish engineering. It’s because of the fact that transportation wasn’t seen as necessary to the maintenance of a free state. The right to keep and bear arms was.
I’ll freely admit to engaging in a bit of reductio ad absurdum here, but it’s still worth noting that Beto has done far more iniquitous damage with his car than almost all AR-15 owners will ever do. Let’s keep in mind the reason that Beto is all “hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15” is because of their use in mass shootings.
Yet, as the Foundation for Economic Education notes, given statistics from 2007 to 2017, “it would take almost one-hundred years of mass shootings with AR-15s to produce the same number of homicide victims that knives and sharp objects produce in one year.”
Given that there were 10,874 drunk-driving-related deaths in 2017 and 173 mass shooting victims over the decade mentioned previously, it would take more than 600 years for mass shooting victims of AR-15s to match just a single year of drunk-driving fatalities.
And still, we trust Beto with a vehicle. In fact, I distinctly remember him with a truck during that absurd Annie Leibovitz photo shoot for Vanity Fair he used to kick off his campaign.
It wasn’t just a small truck, either. Dare we call it an “assault vehicle?”
O’Rourke wants to take firearms out of the hands of responsible individuals because irresponsible ones may use them for mass shootings or other miscreant behavior.
The paradox of this eludes him. If DWI Beto got to keep his vehicle, why can’t law-abiding Americans keep their firearms?
However, if this is really the direction he thinks America should go in, then heck yes we should take Beto’s car. He has no constitutional right to it and it’s clear from his prior behavior he can’t be trusted with it.
Will it make any difference? Of course not.
But that doesn’t seem to matter to O’Rourke or any of his gun-grabbing confederates, does it?
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