One of the more interesting moments during last night’s debate came up while Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg were scuffling with each other over who had the better gun-grabbing policy. Anderson Cooper pressed O’Rourke for more details, asking what he planned to do if people simply refused to participate in a mandatory “buyback” program. (A gentle reminder that you can’t “buy back” something you didn’t sell in the first place.) Beto insisted that this would work, suggesting there would be “other consequences” for those who don’t comply. (Free Beacon)

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke promised “other consequences” for Americans who choose not to turn in their firearms under his gun confiscation plan.

O’Rourke was pressed by CNN debate moderator Anderson Cooper on how he planned to “take away weapons from people who do not want to give them up.” He hinted at “other consequences” for individuals unwilling to voluntarily turn their weapons in

“If someone does not turn in an AR-15, or an AK-47, one of these weapons of war, or brings it out in public and brandishes it in an attempt to intimidate—as we saw in Kent State recently—then that weapon will be taken from them,” Beto said. “If they persist, there will be other consequences from law enforcement.”

Here’s the video in case you missed the show.

It’s difficult to imagine what the “other consequences” are aside from having police or sheriff’s deputies show up at your house and forcibly remove the firearms. And that’s not a job that any of our law enforcement officers are going to be looking forward to. Sure, most law-abiding people are going to wind up complying, but there’s always the chance that you’ll be heading to the home of somebody with a “come and get ’em” attitude and things could turn ugly quickly.

Less drastic options could include threatening to revoke the permits of people not in compliance. But yet again you wind up turning people who haven’t been accused of committing any crime into criminals and treating them as such.

Gun confiscation is a losing proposition politically and even a majority of the candidates on the stage aren’t willing to go that far. Even if I were a supporter of a ban on so-called “assault weapons” it’s easy to see the more rational, if slower route to achieving the Democrats’ objectives. If you ban the manufacture and sale of that class of firearms but grandfather all of the ones currently in legal circulation, the majority of them will eventually fall out of circulation through attrition. Yes, it would likely take several generations, but it would happen eventually.

But that won’t satisfy the rabid gun-grabbers in this political circus, however. They need immediate action. So we’re likely to continue hearing bizarre plans like these all the way through the primary. Next November we’ll find out how the voters feel about it after the Democratic platform gets pushed so far to the left that it’s ready to fall off a cliff.