The Patriot Post® · Surprise! Biden's Not Done With Guns

When Congress passed and President Joe Biden recently signed what Democrats kept calling the only significant gun legislation in 30 years, we warned that Democrats weren’t going to declare victory and call it a day. They were always going to, as Biden said himself yesterday, keep trying “to get much more done.”

“It’s not enough,” Biden argued on Monday, “and we all know that.”

That was after he boasted about having made “a moral choice with profound, real-world implications.” He framed it as a rhetorical question and answer: “Will we take wise steps to fulfill the responsibility to protect the innocent and while keeping faith with constitutional rights? Will we match thoughts and prayers with action? I say yes.” He added that the legislation is “proof that despite the naysayers, we can make meaningful progress on dealing with gun violence.”

But forget all that because, as he spent the rest of his speech explaining, there’s more “progress” to be made. (The father of a Parkland victim heckled him to help make that case.)

Biden threw in a few perfunctory nods to the Second Amendment, but mostly his speech was aimed at curtailing it. “The right to bear arms is not an absolute right that dominates all others,” he insisted. “Yes, there’s a right to bear arms, but we also have the right to live freely,” he added, as if bearing arms and living freely are mutually exclusive.

His argument boils down to the ends justifying the means because so many Americans die. “Over 40,000 people died from gunshot wounds last year in the United States, 25,000 by suicide,” he said. “Why has it come to this? We all know a lot of the reasons: gun lobby, gun manufacturers, special interest money, the rise of hyper-partisan tribal politics in the country where we don’t debate the issues on the merits and we just rather turn on each other from our corners and attack the other side.”

What a disgusting display of exactly what he criticized. He wants you to believe that 25,000 people struggling with depression and anxiety killed themselves because of the gun lobby. That is sick and twisted, and it’s a great illustration of why there’s a partisan divide.

He listed some “facts” that aren’t so factual, such as that the so-called “assault weapons” ban of 1994 saved lives and that it was only lifted in 2004 “under pressure from the NRA and the gun manufacturers and others.” No, it was written to sunset after 10 years, and a Republican Congress chose not to renew it. Crime, including murder, also continued to fall after it ended.

In 2019, the latest year FBI statistics are available, there were 364 murders committed with rifles of any type. Compare that to the 600 people killed with “hands, fists, feet, etc.” Most murders are indeed committed with firearms, but the vast majority of killers use handguns, and they do so mostly in the Democrat-run criminal cesspools we call American cities.

Nevertheless, Biden’s not done chasing another ban on AR-15s: “I’m determined to ban these weapons again and high-capacity magazines that hold 30 rounds and that let mass shooters fire hundreds of bullets in a matter of minutes. I’m not going to stop until we do it.”

The AR-15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the United States, a key factor in the Supreme Court’s Heller ruling upholding the right to own firearms. In other words, government can’t ban guns in common use.

More importantly, Biden loves to act as if there’s no conceivable reason to own an AR-15 because it’s not a great deer-hunting rifle. Memo to Joe: The Second Amendment ain’t about hunting. Despite Biden’s repeated contention about all the limitations he thinks government is free to place on the Second Amendment, it exists for a simple reason: To ensure an armed citizenry is capable of repelling exactly that kind of tyranny.