Joe Biden Pushes Assault Weapons Ban, Buyback When Asked About ‘Come For Your Guns’

Former Vice President and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden strongly advocated for a ban on new sales and national buyback of military-style rifles in an interview with Anderson Cooper, and he didn’t blink when the CNN host confronted him with the “come for your guns” talking point he’s likely to hear from conservatives: “Bingo. You’re right, if you have an assault weapon.”

In the wake of the El Paso and Dayton, Ohio mass shootings, Biden was criticizing the lack of action on gun control by both President Donald Trump and the Republican Senate. Though the 1994 assault weapons ban that Biden helped shepherd through Congress — and that was subsequently signed into law by President Bill Clinton — was riddled with loopholes and considered highly ineffective, Biden made the argument that high rate of fire weapons and high-capacity magazines are simply too dangerous for the general public to own.

“Does anybody think it made any sense that someone is able to walk into a gun store, buy an assault weapon that has multiple rounds or buy an assault weapon that has 100 rounds?” Biden asked. The shooter in Dayton reportedly had outfitted his rifle with drum magazines capable of holding 100 rounds, allowing him to fire 41 shots in less than 30 seconds. “Do you want more of them on the street? Do we want to do that?”

Cooper confronted Biden with the likely right-wing

rebuttal: “So to gun owners out there who say ‘Well, a Biden administration means they will come for my guns.'”

“Bingo. You’re right, if you have an assault weapon,” Biden quickly replied. “The fact of the matter is they should be illegal, period. Look, the Second Amendment doesn’t say you can’t restrict the kinds of weapon people can own. You can’t buy a bazooka or have a flamethrower. The guys who make these arguments say ‘The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots, we need the protection against the government.’ Well, you’ll need an F-15 for that. You need something well beyond whether or not you have an assault weapon.”

The ban and buyback programs Biden proposed is not gun confiscation, he clarified.

“That’s not walking into their home, knocking on their doors, and going through the gun cabinets,” Biden said. “Right now, there is no legal way to deny them the right, if they legally purchased them. But we can, in fact, make a major effort to get them off the street and out of the possession of people” through a buyback program.

And Biden also offered a subtle rebuke of 2020 rival Sen. Kamala Harris, who has promised to sign a number of gun control executive orders in her first days in the Oval Office.

“The problem with that is if it

’s just an executive order, when the next guy comes along and wipes it out, which the president [Trump] did,” Biden pointed out. “You have to get legislation to do that. But to say that you need to eliminate the gun show loophole to define what constitutes — I’m the guy that pushed the Brady Bill through the United States Congress when I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee on background checks. You can in fact do those kinds of things, but cannot as a matter of executive order constitutionally say ‘This is what we’re going to do relative to this particular weapon.'”

Watch the video above, via CNN.