Kayleigh McEnaney’s blunt assessment lands at a moment when three avowed socialists just captured Democratic nominations, and the party’s leadership is conspicuously refusing to disavow them. The phrase “play footsie with communists” is not rhetorical excess; it captures the strategic calculation that tolerating radical economic rhetoric is worth the price of locking down the activist base ahead of November. For the firearms community that calculation is especially ominous, because the same coalition that now shrugs at Marxist language has already made “assault-weapon” bans, magazine restrictions, and red-flag seizures central to its platform. When economic collectivism and gun confiscation travel together, the result is not abstract theory but concrete policy once the radicals move from the primary to the general election.

History offers a clear warning. Every 20th-century regime that began by romanticizing state control of property ended by monopolizing the means of self-defense; the first step was always registration, the last step prohibition. Today’s self-described democratic socialists insist their plans are different, yet their own literature calls for repealing the Second Amendment or, at minimum, licensing ownership through a federal registry. That is why donors who fund these candidates also bankroll groups whose mission statements list “ending the gun-violence epidemic” as a euphemism for ending private firearm ownership. The 2A community therefore has a direct stake in whether the Democratic Party treats its socialist wing as an embarrassing outlier or as the future of the coalition.

The practical takeaway is straightforward: every dollar, every volunteer hour, and every vote that strengthens these candidates accelerates the timetable for national gun control. Primary voters in safely blue districts may feel insulated, but the infrastructure they are building—data banks, model legislation, and a bench of rising officeholders—travels to purple states the moment the radicals consolidate power. The firearms industry’s response must therefore move beyond defensive litigation and toward sustained political hygiene: exposing the intellectual and financial links between socialist economics and civilian disarmament, and reminding voters that the right to keep and bear arms is the last check against any government that decides to “play footsie” with the ideology that historically disarmed its citizens first.