President Joe Biden (D) has long made his anti-gun goals clear on his path to the White House. Now, just before the midterm election on Nov. 8, the White House is saying that the president will “do everything in his power” to bring his gun-control agenda to fruition.
In a statement released late in the evening of Nov. 1, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “Gun violence in this country is an epidemic that will not end with thoughts and prayers alone. President Biden will continue to do everything in his power to reduce gun violence, including by calling on Congress to increase community violence intervention funding, ensure universal background checks, and send legislation to his desk banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
Let’s break this statement down.
To start, Jean-Pierre peddled the false claim that firearms ownership is somehow a sickness of sorts. The exercise of a constitutional right is hardly an illness. Charles C.W. Cooke aptly summed this up when he wrote, “Politicians who don’t believe you should have Second Amendment rights have often tried to hide their gun-control laws in arguments for ‘public health.’ The idea is to turn a matter of elementary liberty into a crisis that mandates instant action.”
Anti-Second Amendment politicians have repeatedly claimed that there is a “gun-violence epidemic,” which, according to them, necessitates curtailing the rights of law-abiding citizens. In actuality, firearms are simply tools.
Jean-Pierre then said that President Biden will “do everything in his power” to enact “universal background checks” and to ban so-called “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines.”
These proposed background checks on private gun loans, gifts and sales would never be “universal,” as the criminal element in our society—which is the actual problem, by the way—will not comply to mandated background checks. Only the law-abiding will. Therefore, control of lawfully armed citizens is actually what this entire legislative idea is about.
As for “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines,” these are also (surprise!) loaded terms invented purely for political purposes. It seems that Biden is attempting to revive a version of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which was found to have had a negligible effect, if any, on crime according to a congressionally mandated study.
We’ve detailed and debunked these policies numerous times, and repeatedly explained the danger of using these falsified terms. The “assault weapons” Biden seeks to ban are simply semi-automatic firearms, of which there are reportedly more than 24.4 million rifles alone in circulation. Then there is arguably the most popular self-defense handgun—the 9 mm semi-automatic—which numbers in the tens-of-millions, and which Biden has also referred to as “assault weapons” and called for banning. As for “high-capacity magazines,” Biden likes to say nobody needs 100 rounds in a magazine, but then labels magazines holding 10 or more rounds as “high capacity.” More recently, he seems to have changed his definition of “high-capacity magazine” to one that holds more than eight rounds. A 2021 estimate from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reports there are over 300 million of these magazines in circulation already.
Rather than address the criminal element within society, this administration once again seeks to punish the law-abiding. Though the call for gun control from the Biden administration isn’t new, the renewed effort to “do everything in his power” to pass what is clearly an unpopular and unconstitutional agenda is troubling.
Jean-Pierre, like her predecessor and president, is ill-informed about American freedom. Voters will have the chance to tell them as much on Nov. 8.
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