Clash of the Freedom-Haters, round three

I didn't watch it. I never watch Dem debates or Trump rallies. I sink into grim states of mind about post-America's future easily enough as it is.

But from all I've read so far today, it seems like Jim Geraghty at National Review sums up the essence well:

No matter how the moderators ask, “what would you do on this issue?” the candidates can offer some version of, “I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do, I wouldn’t do what Trump has done, because he’s done X, Y, and Z and that’s destroying the American dream/dividing us/corrupting the ideals of America/leaving a worse world for our children.” Cue audience applause.

Actually, when it came to guns, some of them did offer proposals, and they were doozies.

Beto:

"Some on this stage have suggested a voluntary buyback for guns in this country," ABC News host David Muir said in comments directed to O'Rourke. "You have gone further. You said, quote, 'Americans who own AR-15s and AK-47s will have to sell them to the government, all of them.' You know the critics call this confiscation. Are you proposing taking away their guns and how would this work?"

O'Rourke, who has largely focused his campaign on radical gun control since the tragic mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso, answered emphatically that he is proposing to take away guns he described as "designed to kill people on a battlefield." Before O'Rourke could complete his response, the Democratic crowd erupted in applause.

"I am, if it is a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield," he said, the enthusiastic applause beginning even before he could add the "battlefield" qualifier. "If the high impact high velocity round, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers. When we see that being used against children and in Odessa. I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15. And that mother watched her bleed to death over the course of an hour because so many other people were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa and Midland [that] there weren't enough ambulances to get to them in time."

"Hell yes we are going to take your AR-15, your AK-47," he declared amid an even stronger eruption of applause. "We are not going to allow it to be used against fellow Americans anymore." 

Kamala Harris, who in round two strongly hinted that the government would get involved in citizens' meat consumption, also went in for the gun-confiscation position.

So, back to the moderator's second question on the subject when pose to Beto, the one about how would it work:

Ari Cohn‏Verified account @AriCohn

The most depressing part about tonight's #DemocraticDebate is when @KamalaHarris replied to @JoeBiden's claim that her proposed exec order would be unconstitutional by *laughing* and blithely saying "instead of saying no we can't, how about yes we can" and listing Very Bad Things

Yeah, ha ha ha. How silly to think that an inconsequential obstacle like the Constitution could stand in the way of a glorious vision like an unarmed populace.

Biden, by the way was the only one all night to even mention the supreme law of the land:

As the crowd hooted and applauded, Delaware's favorite son attempted to interject: "Let's be constitutional! We've got a Constitution." Ha ha, what?

There were many things missing from this third Democratic presidential debate—a straightforward defense of free trade, say, or any notion that trillion-dollar federal deficits are unsound in year nine of an economic expansion. But perhaps the most striking absence was any sense from Biden's nine challengers on stage that there are, or should be, constraints on the executive branch carrying out the domestic policy whims of the Democratic electorate.

Harris, as is her wont, expressed the will to power most blatantly. "The idea that we would wait for this Congress, which has just done nothing, to act, is just—it is overlooking the fact that every day in America, our babies are going to school to have drills, elementary, middle, and high school students, where they are learning about how they have to hide in a closet or crouch in a corner if there is a mass shooter roaming the hallways of their school."

Marianne Williamson, of course, was not there, and has probably sealed her fate regarding any future debate participation with this hot-mic moment after a Fox News interview:

“What does it say that the conservatives are nicer to me? I’m a serious lefty but they are so — I understand why people on the right called them godless — I mean, it’s like, I didn’t think the left was as mean as the right, they are.”

It's probably way too hopeful to consider the possibility that she's inching toward a conversion experience, but I'm glad she got her eyes opened on this particular matter.