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February 16, 2021
By Mark Chesnut
In his first three weeks as president, Joe Biden kept mostly mum about gun control. Sure, he tabbed anti-gun judge Merrick Garland as his attorney general, a backhand blow to America’s gun owners. And, emboldened by his presence in the White House, Democrats in Congress introduced an anti-gun measure so all-encompassing that it would basically outlaw nearly everything about gun ownership that most gun owners hold dear.
However, on Sunday, February 14th the silence ended. That’s when Biden released a statement officially launching his administration’s full-scale assault on the right to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment.
Using the mass murder at Parkland High School in Florida three years ago to the day as the occasion, Biden said in a statement: “This Administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call. We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer. Today, I am calling on Congress to enact common sense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets. We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change. The time to act is now.”
If there was anything surprising about the announcement, it was probably Biden’s lack of imagination in choosing his pet proposals to tout. Truth be told, Biden was around when the 1994 Clinton Gun Ban, which included a magazine limit, was passed. And, he was still in D.C. 10 years later when it was allowed to sunset. Its ineffectiveness at reducing violent crime is easily proven using FBI crime statistics.
Biden has also been around long enough to have heard the reasons that a so-called “universal” background check system would never work. Chief among those reasons, of course, is the fact that only law-abiding Americans would follow such a law, and they’re not the ones causing violent crime!
As for “eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” Biden knows that no such immunity exists. He was, as a matter of fact, already a part of the swamp back when Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, designed to head off planned bankruptcy of gunmakers and gun sellers that would have come from hundreds of frivolous lawsuits against them. From the outset, the idea wasn’t for gun-ban municipalities to win the lawsuits against gunmakers. It was, instead, to bankrupt the companies boy having to fight lawsuit after lawsuit in court.
Fact is, President Biden has been in Washington, D.C., for most of his adult life. You might even call him a charter member of the swamp. He’s heard such proposals cussed and discussed for decades, and he knows they wouldn’t have any effect on the actual violent crime problem in our country.
Why does he push such schemes, you might ask. For the answer, never forget this: Gun control is, and always has been, less about guns and more about control.
Freelance writer and editor Mark Chesnut is the owner/editorial director at Red Setter Communications LLC. An avid hunter, shooter and political observer, he has been covering Second Amendment issues and politics on a near-daily basis for the past 20 years.
