Last month, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke proposed a modest solution to the relentless tide of mass shootings: a mandatory buyback program for every AR-15 in the country. The View co-host Meghan McCain responded with a dire warning. “The AR-15 is by far the most popular gun in America, by far,” she told her fellow panelists. “I was just in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, if you’re talking about taking people’s guns from them, there’s going to be a lot of violence.”

Tucker Carlson echoed McCain’s blood-soaked sentiment on his Tuesday night broadcast. “So, this is—what you are calling for is civil war,” he said. “What you are calling for is an incitement to violence. It’s something I wouldn’t want to live here when that happened, would you? I’m serious.” Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative columnist, also warned of tragedy. “I know people who keep AR-15’s buried because they’re afraid one day the government might come for them,” he wrote on Twitter. “I know others who are stockpiling them. It is not a stretch to say there’d be violence if the [government] tried to confiscate them.”

“There would be violence” neatly elides what’s actually being claimed: Some gun-rights activists would murder government officials who try to enforce a duly passed law. This isn’t an extreme viewpoint among such gun enthusiasts. If anything, it’s one of their central tenets.

Let’s examine the hypothetical scenario in which something akin to O’Rourke’s proposal gets enacted. First, Democrats capture the White House and the Senate in next year’s election. Second, they pass a federal law that requires mandatory buybacks of AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles. Third, the Supreme Court narrowly upholds the law’s constitutionality, perhaps with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the fifth vote to save it on narrow grounds. This sequence of events is slightly improbable. Then again, so were the events that led to Donald Trump becoming president.

Who, then, would gun-rights supporters murder in response? Would it be the lawmakers who passed the law? Would it be the judges who rejected legal challenges to it? Would it be the president who championed the initiative on the campaign trail and spent political capital to make it a reality? Perhaps the activists, such as the parents of children killed at Sandy Hook and the teenagers who saw their classmates die in Parkland, would be targeted. The civil servants tasked with implementing the buyback program might have to face this grave danger. So would the cops who come knocking on doors, looking for unaccounted AR-15s.