Former Vice President Joe Biden mimics shooting a gun as he speaks at the Chuck Hagel Forum in Global Leadership, on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Omaha, in Omaha, Neb., Thursday, Feb. 28, 2019. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

If you thought it was only Beto O’Rourke among the 2020 candidates who wanted to come for your guns, you’d be wrong.

Joe Biden, one of the frontrunners, made it very clear he’s coming for your guns too. He just couches his language a little more than does Beto to make it appear more palatable.

Biden’s proposal, which he announced at a gun safety forum in Nevada on Wednesday, is calling for a ban on “assault-style weapons” (whatever that means to Democrats this week).

But for the weapons that people already have, he’s proposing a voluntary “buyback” (how can it be a buyback when you didn’t buy it from the government?) or registering the guns with the government, a glaring obvious constitutional issue by which he doesn’t seem bothered.

Americans who keep their guns would be required to register them and they would have to go through the same requirements that people go through now to comply with the National Firearms Act.

From Fox News:

The Biden campaign, in announcing the plan, said “the National Firearms Act requires individuals possessing machine-guns, silencers and short-barreled rifles to undergo a background check and register those weapons with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Due to these requirements, such weapons are rarely used in crimes.” The former vice president’s plan also calls for banning high capacity magazines as well as assault-style weapons, closing loopholes in background checks before firearms purchases, banning the online sale of guns, eliminating legal protections that currently protect gun manufacturers from being held legally liable if their weapons are used in mass shootings and allowing states to implement “red flag” laws.

The problem is that this would basically criminalize regular rifles like the AR-15, the most popular, but also the most wrongly demonized rifle in the country. People like Biden and other Democrats vilify it calling it a “weapon of war” despite it not being a military weapon. They paint it as an evil machine gun rather than the truth – a rifle that fires one bullet per trigger pull. One of the reasons it’s popular and has sometimes been used in mass shootings is because it’s light and easily maneuverable. It’s the same thing that makes them good rifles for hunting, sport and self-defense.

If you really want to diminish gun deaths, you would go after the criminals using them in places like Chicago and Baltimore. There, you can predict that every weekend people will be shot with a majority of the cases related to drugs and/or gangs. Address that, and you will have addressed something.

While Biden’s plan would pull weapons from the law-abiding it would do precious little to address the criminals using guns.

As NRO notes, registration is a non-starter:

But we know registration is a failed policy, one that’s routinely met with massive public indifference. It’s estimated that as many as 1 million New Yorkers have defied the Empire State’s assault-weapon-registration law, and as many as 85 percent of Connecticut assault-weapon owners have flouted the Nutmeg State’s registration requirement. A California registration requirement has had compliance rates as low as 3.6 percent. If states are the laboratories of democracy, then registration is a lab experiment that’s failed.

But more importantly, the assault weapons ban which Biden touts as “his” accomplishment in 1994 in reality failed to make any measurable difference in gun deaths.

From Investors Business Daily:

The main reason the failure of the ban to make a difference: “assault weapons” account for a tiny share of gun crimes — less than 6%. Even among mass shootings, most didn’t involve an “assault weapon” in the decade before the ban went into effect. Mass shootings didn’t stop during the ban, either — there were 16 while the ban was in effect, which resulted in 237 deaths or injuries. In fact, it was while the ban was in effect that the Columbine High School massacre happened, in which 13 students were killed and 24 injured.

But Biden’s plan is a reminder of this classic: