Well, sort of. Rep. Eric Swalwell didn’t come right out and suggest declaring war on gun owners, but if you boil his argument down to its natural ramifications, that’s what the California Democrat’s latest anti-gun op-ed amounts to. With every high-profile shooting comes increasingly vociferous demands by leftists to regulate the Second Amendment on the way toward full repeal.

In the past, Democrats have stuck mostly to regurgitating a tired, old refrain — Congress needs to enact another so-called “assault” weapons ban. And Rep. Swalwell is no different. In a new USA Today op-ed, he critiques firearms like the AR-15 as “a hand-held weapon of war, capable of spraying a crowd with more lethal fire in seconds.” He adds: “Reinstating the federal assault weapons ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004 would prohibit manufacture and sales.” But even he acknowledges what conservatives argue when opposing new gun control measures — a gun ban “would not affect weapons already possessed,” he says.

That’s where Swalwell turns to promoting even more extreme measures. He opines: “Instead, we should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons [emphasis added].” During the last ban, guns that were targeted but were already possessed were grandfathered in. But Democrats are sliding further down that slippery slope today by promoting outright confiscation.

And this is where the Left’s campaign against the Second Amendment is chock-full of irony and recoil. The urge by leftists to “get military guns off our streets” means that confiscation is becoming more of a mainstream idea among party members. Strangely, Democrats think the enforcement of this plan would be as simple as prosecuting those who chose civil disobedience. They wrongly surmise that millions of gun owners don’t view the God-given right to bear arms as something worth dying for. Here’s the unvarnished truth: Attempted gun confiscation would result in a war far worse than what leftists ostensibly endeavor to avoid.