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The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and Other Things Joe Biden Keeps Lying About

Posted on | May 26, 2022 | 1 Comment

“As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name
are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?
When in God’s name will we do what we all know
in our gut needs to be done? . . . [T]he gun
manufacturers have spent two decades aggressively
marketing assault weapons which make them
the most and largest profit. For God’s sake, we
have to have the courage to stand up to the industry.”
— Joe Biden, May 24, 2022

There are millions — literally millions — of AR-15-type rifles legally owned by law-abiding American citizens who have never shot another human being. The fact that Salvador Ramos owned two of them cannot be interpreted as signifying that everybody who owns an AR-15 is a menace to society, because if you want to engage in irresponsible generalization like that, I could think of some other generalizations relevant to violent crime that no sensible politician would dare invoke.

Biden’s rhetoric is dishonest, not only in its details, but in the larger sense of the false implication that it is a “lobby” or an “industry” that he desires to crush with regulations — no, it’s gun owners he’s after.

Those of us old enough to remember the dishonesty by which Democrats rammed the 1994 “assault weapons ban” through Congress know all of this. There was no actual crisis that demanded such onerous regulations which, in point of fact, did not “ban” any weapons (i.e., those guns that were already owned remained legal, but importation and domestic retail sales were prohibited), and made purely aesthetic distinctions between “banned” weapons and others that were functionally identical. By the way, these were semi-automatic rifles, not “assault weapons,” which are fully automatic, commonly referred to as “machine guns.”

Speaking of functionally identical weapons, the most common weapon used in homicides (including what are called “mass shootings”) are semi-automatic pistols, of which at least 5 million are sold annually. Last year alone, Americans bought more than 18 million guns of all types, and about 30% of those were first-time buyers alarmed by the startling rise in violent crime (a problem that Joe Biden and the Democrats aren’t doing anything to solve). Did you know, by the way, that more than half of firearms-related deaths are suicides? No, you didn’t know that, because the media isn’t going to tell you. How many homicides are committed with rifles? About 3%, according to the Department of Justice. So banning AR-15s wouldn’t make a meaningful dent in the overall violent crime problem, a fact that Joe Biden and the media won’t mention in the wake of an atrocity like Uvalde (or the Buffalo shooting) because this is all about ginning up fear among the so-called “soccer moms.”

A semi-automatic weapon is a semi-automatic weapon. I got my first one, a Winchester .22 rifle, for Christmas when I was 12 years old. Never killed anything other than maybe a couple of squirrels or birds. Fear-mongering nonsense about “assault weapons” from liberal politicians doesn’t do anything except confuse ignorant people (i.e., Democratic voters) who can’t be bothered to educate themselves about the actual facts of crime. If you get carjacked, chances are the perp is going to be wielding a semiautomatic 9-mm or .40-caliber pistol which is (a) a good bit cheaper than an AR-15 and (b) easier to conceal and use at short range. Rifles aren’t much use in a common robbery, because you can’t just hide a rifle in your pocket. Cops might notice somebody walking down the street with a rifle, even in the worst parts of Philadelphia, and as stupid as the criminals in Philly are, they aren’t that stupid.

What are the so-called “common sense gun laws” that Biden and other Democrats keep talking about? Jim Geraghty at National Review has gone through some of this stuff, pointing out for example why the demand for “tougher background checks” has nothing to do with what happened at Uvalde:

As far as we know, as of this writing, the Uvalde shooter had no criminal record. No one in law enforcement, his family, or his school ever filed a petition seeking to remove firearms from his possession because he posed a potential threat to himself or others. As far as we know, no one ever filed a restraining order against him. The shooter purchased his firearms legally.
In the coming days and weeks, you will hear a lot more calls for “tougher background checks,” but because there was no paper trail indicating that the Uvalde shooter was a threat, it is hard to see what kind of “background check” would have prevented this legal adult from purchasing a firearm. Federally licensed firearms dealers are not going to comb through the Instagram and social-media accounts of potential buyers.

Over and over again, in the wake of such incidents, Democrats will reach into their Gigantic Bag of Dishonest Bullshit (which they keep handy for such occasions) and start advocating measures which would not have prevented the incident that gave rise to the demand for “action.”

We must “do something,” Democrats demand, ignoring the fundamental problem that (a) criminals don’t obey laws, (b) Democrats are against putting criminals in jail anyway, (c) Americans own millions of guns and (d) many crimes are committed with stolen guns. So even if you passed some kind of “ban” on sales of AR-15s, this wouldn’t do anything about the millions of AR-15s already owned by Americans, besides which criminals prefer to use pistols, and even if they did want to use a rifle, all they’d have to do is steal one. And because they’re criminals, stealing is what they do anyway. One of the rhetorical tricks Democrats like to use is to say “we need to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people,” but for some reason, they keep letting “the wrong people” out of jail.

The mass shooting in Chicago last week was allegedly committed by a felon who got turned loose on a weapons charge and had been wanted on an outstanding warrant for six months. Let me give you a hint about the suspect’s identity: Probably not a Trump voter, IYKWIMAITYD.

There were about 20,000 homicides in the U.S. last year. Guess how many died of drug overdoses? More than 100,000, mostly from opioids like fentanyl. What is the Biden administration doing about the fentanyl problem? Are they locking up drug dealers? Closing down the U.S.-Mexico border? No, they’re turning a blind eye to the drug problem because the drug dealers — well, they’re probably not Trump voters, IYKWIMAITYD — and Democrats are totally in favor of chaos on the border, because they count every illegal immigrant as a future Democratic voter. What’s the point of having laws, if you’re not going to enforce the laws? Democrats are the anti-law enforcement party, and yet they demand that we pass new laws, even while they’re turning loose criminals who break the laws we’ve already got.

What kind of fool would believe a word Joe Biden says about guns? Probably the same kind of fools who voted for him — 81 million votes!




 

Category: Crime, Joe Biden, Texas

Comments

One Response to “The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and Other Things Joe Biden Keeps Lying About”

  1. News of the Week (May 29th, 2022) | The Political Hat
    May 29th, 2022 @ 6:52 pm

    […] The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and … There are millions — literally millions — of AR-15-type rifles legally owned by law-abiding American citizens who have never shot another human being. The fact that Salvador Ramos owned two of them cannot be interpreted as signifying that everybody who owns an AR-15 is a menace to society, because if you want to engage in irresponsible generalization like that, I could think of some other generalizations relevant to violent crime that no sensible politician would dare invoke. […]