The FBI released its Uniform Crime Report for 2018 on Monday. Notably, the number of homicides decreased significantly — by 7%. What may be even more surprising is that murders committed with firearms fell by 6.7%. And of those murders committed with a firearm, only 2.8% were with a rifle (this includes AR-type rifles), for a total of 297. It’s not a new trend, but The Washington Free Beacon notes, “Rifles were used less often to commit murder than knives, fists, and blunt objects.” Meanwhile, the overall steady decrease in violent crime has coincided with a steady increase in the number of firearms sold and owned. These are the facts.

However, one would not know this reality after listening to the rhetoric coming from the Democrat presidential candidates who gathered in Las Vegas on Wednesday for the dubiously titled “2020 Gun Safety Forum.” The forum was spearheaded by the anti-firearms activist organization March for Our Lives, and it gave each of the candidates 30 minutes to present their plans for gun control. And as one would imagine, any semblance of genuine concern over protecting Americans’ Second Amendment rights was exuberantly quashed in favor of the unanimously agreed upon “need” for “commonsense” gun control.

With the backdrop of the event orchestrated to coincide with the two-year anniversary of the Las Vegas atrocity, nine Democrat candidates, using emotionally hyperbolic language combined with personal anecdotes that were devoid of any relevant facts, offered some of the most draconian firearms proposals to date.

All of the Democrats advocated proposals such as universal background checks and “red flag” laws. However, not everyone was willing to jump aboard Beto O'Rourke’s gun-confiscation bandwagon. O'Rourke, who has focused his entire campaign on essentially eliminating the Second Amendment, called for a “mandatory buyback” of all semiautomatic rifles, tying ownership of “assault weapons” to racism. (Actually, it’s gun control that has a racist history, but that’s another story.) Likewise, Cory Booker threw his support behind a mandatory buyback, but suggested that no force would be needed to enforce the law. (Wrong.) Pete Buttigieg called the “mandatory” part of a buyback a long shot. He didn’t object on constitutional grounds but rather saw it as politically untenable. Julian Castro endorsed a voluntary buyback and registry of firearm owners. Elizabeth Warren called for more federal studies on the cause of “gun violence,” while conveniently ignoring the mass of data definitively showing that the vast majority of gun-related crimes are directly tied to criminal activity such as drugs and gangs, primarily operating in Democrat-controlled urban centers. Joe Biden broke with the buyback proposal and instead called for repealing laws that protect gun manufacturers’ civil liability and for banning online sales.

What was conspicuously absent from this forum was any defense of the Second Amendment. The bottom line is, Democrats want to remove as many firearms as possible from the American citizenry. The reason: Democrats don’t want to be held to account by an American population that is armed. If a government doesn’t fear its citizens, then it can and will abuse them.