I’m a big fan of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Somali congresswoman who always speaks her mind. Of course, I’m not a fan because I like her politics. But I do like the fact that nearly every time she speaks out in public, it serves as a warning for freedom-loving Americans that a true threat exists within our own federal lawmaking body.
Such was the case recently when Rep. Omar was caught on camera weighing in on a critical issue that many of us haven’t thought about for a while. In a video reposted on the Texas Gun Rights X page, Rep. Omar enthusiastically shared her views on registration and what always follows registration—confiscation.
“We have more guns in this country than we have humans,” she said in the video. “So, one of the things that is going to be important is to create a registry so we know where the guns are. We know when they go into the wrong hands when they’re stolen. And we can actually start a buyback program. I know that some of the Minnesota legislators have had that legislation, and that’s something that we should be thinking about on a federal level.”
It’s interesting that Rep. Omar would mention a “gun buyback” in the same breath as gun registration. Pro-gun advocates have warned for years that registration always leads to confiscation wherever it has been tried. Thus, anti-gun Democrats have avoided lumping the topics together.
As we’ve chronicled a number of times on TTAG, there are numerous other problems with gun “buybacks” besides the elephant in the room—eventual confiscation. First, they can’t be “buybacks” because the government never owned the firearms they are confiscating through compensation.
Equally as important, though, a 2022 study looking at the effectiveness of so-called gun “buybacks,” what the researchers called GBPs, and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that such “buybacks” have no measurable impact on reducing violent crime. The paper is titled “Have U.S. Gun Buybacks Misfired,” and was authored by Toshio Ferrazares, Joseph J. Sabia and D. Mark Anderson.
“Given our estimated null findings, with 95 percent confidence, we can rule out decreases in firearm-related crime of greater than 1.3 percent during the year following a buyback,” the study’s abstract concluded. “Using data from the National Vital Statistics System, we also find no evidence that GBPs reduce suicides or homicides where a firearm was involved.”
Rep. Omar’s statements supporting a “buyback” shouldn’t be all that surprising to gun owners who are paying attention to politics on the federal level. This spring, anti-gun lawmakers in Congress introduced House Resolution 2948, titled the “Safer Neighborhoods Gun Buyback Act of 2025.” The measure’s stated goal is to “authorize the Director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance to make grants to States, units of local government, and gun dealers to conduct gun buyback programs, and for other purposes.”
Through the program, the federal government would provide lower governmental entities “smart pre-paid cards” to trade from citizens’ personally owned firearms.
“A State or unit of local government that receives a grant under this title shall return to the Director any remaining smart prepaid cards and any unused portion of such grant at the end of the two-year and 270-day period beginning on the date that the grant was awarded,” the legislation states. “A gun dealer that receives a grant or subgrant under this title shall return to the Director any remaining smart prepaid cards and any unused portion of such grant or subgrant that was allocated to be used to buy back guns.”
While Rep. Omar is far from the only Democrat in Congress who thinks guns should be registered and “bought back,” I’m actually glad she made the recent remarks. If nothing else, it brings the topic to the forefront again, so gun owners who might get complacent can realize the assault on the Second Amendment is still alive and thriving.
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