“This is what their goal is. We’ve always said it, now they’re saying it,” said Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation, based in Washington state. “Now they’ve said it and we’re going to make them eat it.”…

By all accounts, Trump needs to run up the score in rural areas to win reelection next year. The 2020 outcome is expected to depend heavily on a trio of Rust Belt states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that have large numbers of rural voters, many of whom are gun-owners or sympathetic to owners on this issue. And Democrats’ hope of winning control of the Senate rests on states with high rates of gun ownership, like Arizona and Texas.

Several gun control groups stressed Friday that they were not advocating confiscation, but they also didn’t follow Coons’ lead in condemning O’Rourke’s declaration.

“I think it is very understandable that he is taking a policy position that the larger gun safety community hasn’t taken and he’s trying to push the envelope,” said Robin Lloyd, managing director of Giffords, the gun control group named after Gabby Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who survived a gunshot wound to the head in 2011. “If the American voter does not think this is an appropriate solution, they’ll let us know.”