The Patriot Post® · Biden's Shotgun Approach to Executive Orders

Inflation is still 6% (10.2% for groceries), employers are still understaffed, banks are still too big to fail, migrants are still flooding across the border, and fentanyl is still killing roughly 200 people per day. But Joe Biden’s got a fever, and the only prescription is more gun control.

He issued an executive order Tuesday that he says ostensibly “helps keep firearms out of dangerous hands” by directing Attorney General Merrick Garland “to take every lawful action possib— burp — possible to move us as close as we can to universal background checks without new legislation.” He also says his order “expands public awareness campaigns” about so-called red flag laws.

BIDEN: “My executive order directs my Attorney General to take every lawful action possib— BURP —possible to move us as close as we can to universal background checks without new legislation.” pic.twitter.com/m7kCwBYXMJ

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 14, 2023

Don’t get us wrong — we’re not advocating for violent criminals to legally buy firearms. But most of them already don’t do so legally, and making it more illegal isn’t going to change that. Assault and murder, by the way, remain illegal in all 50 states. The particular gun used in the Monterey Park murders was also already banned in California. Perhaps all those George Soros-funded Democrat DAs in Democrat-run cities should try enforcing the law by prosecuting criminals.

As for red flag laws, no one wants to arm a dangerous man intent upon harm, but pre-crime measures tend to involve violating a person’s Fourth Amendment due process rights on the way to restricting his Second Amendment rights.

To add to the theater of it all, Biden traveled to Monterey Park, California, near the location of a recent mass murder. Democrats always seem to use the caskets of innocents as a platform for their anti-Second Amendment agenda. Biden, who has known great personal loss, gave remarks tugging at people’s heartstrings in a way few can. From devastating personal experience, he does know how to talk about grief.

Yet that grief doesn’t make his policy the right course, either from the standpoint of effectiveness or of American Liberty.

It also doesn’t mean he’s done. It could be argued that he’s chipping around the edges with this order, but he made clear he wants more. A lot more.

“None of this absolves Congress,” he said, “from the responsibility of acting to pass universal background checks [and] eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability. And I am determined once again to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” He added: “Do something. Do something big.”

It’s odd to speak of manufacturer liability just days after bailing out a couple of big banks. In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking this gun order is a distraction from that news. It also happens to be false to claim, as he did once again, that the gun industry is “the only outfit you can’t sue these days.”

On a related note, what of Biden’s liability, along with Barack Obama’s, for running illegal guns to Mexican drug cartels during the Obama administration’s Operation Fast and Furious?

It’s also bizarre to continue railing against semiautomatic rifles with certain cosmetic features, but Biden is obsessed with doing so. “Assault weapons” is a gross misnomer for these firearms, which function the same as the vast majority of other guns, firing a single bullet with each trigger pull. The FBI’s annual report on murders doesn’t separate AR-15s from other rifles (which ought to tell you a lot, by the way), and the total murder count for all rifles in 2020 was 455. Remember that deaths due to fentanyl average roughly 200 per day and that fentanyl is largely smuggled across Joe Biden’s open border. Remember that most crimes with firearms are committed by thugs in Democrat-run urban centers — thugs who have a 50% chance of getting away with it. Remember that most gun deaths are suicides.

Again, don’t get us wrong — we’re not minimizing a single one of those deaths, but we do need perspective when the president of the United States demands that we outlaw legal firearms in common use protected by the Second Amendment. We need that perspective when the same guy who claims “democracy was threatened” within an inch of its life on January 6 also repeatedly threatens the American people that they’re going to need a whole lot more than AR-15s to take on the federal government.

We don’t know about you, but his histrionic threats don’t make us trust him and the federal government to have guns while we go without.