In a move that would be shocking if it weren’t so predictable, Colombia’s outgoing Marxist president Gustavo Petro chose to signal his ideological sympathies by scribbling “Heil Hitler” beneath an opinion piece praising conservative presidential hopeful Abelardo de la Espriella. Far from a clumsy autocorrect or ironic meme, the comment lands as a deliberate endorsement of the very authoritarianism the left claims to oppose—except when the boot is on their own foot. Petro’s regime has already spent years tightening the screws on lawful gun owners, pushing registration schemes and confiscation rhetoric that mirror the same centralized power he now appears to admire in historical form. For the 2A community watching from north of the Darién Gap, the episode is a stark reminder that anti-gun rhetoric and soft-totalitarian signaling often travel together; when a head of state openly flirts with the iconography of the most murderous dictatorship of the twentieth century, his hostility to an armed citizenry stops looking like public-safety policy and starts looking like a power-consolidation strategy.

The deeper implication is that the same ideological current driving Petro’s gun-control agenda is now comfortable enough to drop the mask entirely. Colombian citizens who still possess firearms—many of them legally acquired before the latest round of restrictions—face a government whose leader has publicly aligned himself with the rhetoric of the man who disarmed his own population before turning the state against them. That alignment should serve as a cautionary flare for American gun owners: every call for “common-sense” measures that begins with registration and ends with prohibition has a political endpoint, and that endpoint is rarely friendly to individual liberty. As Petro exits, the 2A community would do well to treat his parting message not as an isolated gaffe but as an unfiltered expression of the worldview that treats the right to keep and bear arms as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.