Bernie Sanders, don’t make it hard for a gun owner to vote for you
As Super Tuesday approaches, Bernie Sanders is looking more and more like the candidate who will secure the Democratic nomination for president. Centrist Democrats are wringing their hands over the idea of having to vote for a self-identified socialist to defeat Donald Trump in a country that takes the big tent approach to political parties, while many progressives are getting the first candidate in their lifetimes about whom they can be enthusiastic. But for me, as a social democrat/democratic socialist who supports gun rights, I have one point of contention with Sanders that must be addressed.
Sanders’s position on guns is bad. In addition to wanting universal background checks and red flag laws — the latter without mentioning due process concerns — his campaign website calls for bans on the sale of so-called assault weapons and so-called high capacity magazines, but also seeks to regulate such weapons — what I assume to be semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines — under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and subsequent legislation that would require law-abiding owners to go through an onerous licensing process and to pay for a $200 tax stamp on each gun that qualifies. He would also ban the 3-D printing of “firearms and bump stocks.”
