When things are going poorly, Joe Biden usually heads out for another gun-control push, issuing executive orders, demanding more legislation, and repeating many of his most preposterous anecdotes and claims. Because Biden’s gun rhetoric offers little more than emotionalism, it doesn’t have to make much sense — which, of course, plays to his greatest strength.
During the spring and summer of 2022, when inflation kept hitting new 40-year highs, Biden gave one cynical speech on gun violence after the next. This week, as the banking system yawned under the weight of his reckless policies, Biden was in Monterey Park, where 11 people were murdered by a 72-year-old lunatic during last year’s Lunar New Year celebration, to demand Congress pass more laws.
Obviously, it’s all meant to be a distraction. But it also needs to be debunked.
Here is CBS News giving the White House the lead it was looking for:
President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that aims to increase the number of background checks to buy guns, promote better and more secure firearms storage and ensure U.S. law enforcement agencies are getting the most out of a bipartisan gun control law enacted last summer.
Biden’s executive order will direct U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to increase background checks by “cracking down on gun sellers who don’t perform them when required.” This is already the law, and there’s no evidence of any widespread problem with licensed gun sellers circumventing checks to illegally sell firearms to criminals.
Even if gun dealers were a bunch of disreputable characters, it makes little sense for them to risk their businesses when a healthy market for legal guns exists. But it is true that occasionally, as happened with the Charleston Church shooter, law enforcement doesn’t do its job. So maybe Biden should sign an executive order demanding the FBI try harder.
The attorney general is free to crack down on criminals whenever he pleases. Biden’s executive orders feed the false perception that more background checks would lead to less violence. Biden admits in his speech that goal of his new EO is “moving us as close as we can to universal background checks without new legislation.”
Guess what? It’s not a fait accompli that “universal” background checks will become law simply because Democrats keep demanding it. “Loophole” in left-wing parlance means someone is ignoring a nonexistent law that Democrats believe should pass.
In this case, the Brady Bill, which instituted the NICS check system, specifically allows sales between two private parties without a background check if both reside in the same state. A right of a non-dealer to sell a firearm to a neighbor or a friend, or whoever, was negotiated as part of a bill. This was not some oversight.
Biden admits he is trying to undo legislation with an executive order, which (at this point, theoretically) exists to help the presidents manage the operations of the federal government, not to move towards legislation they prefer. This kind of lawlessness is nothing new for Biden.
“Let’s be clear,” the president went on. “None of this absolves Congress from the responsibility of acting to pass universal background checks, eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability. And I’m determined once again to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
Gun manufacturers do not have any immunity or special protections from liability. This is just a pernicious lie. When a gun malfunctions due to shoddy design or faulty production, or if they mislead consumers or fail to honor commitments, they are, like everyone else in the country, open to liability. When guns work correctly and are used by criminals in illegal acts, they, like every other industry in the country, are not. In the same way, Ford is not liable when a madman plows into a crowd killing six people, and pharmaceutical companies aren’t liable when people ignore directions.
Biden wants to create a special liability for one industry. And the same media outlets that tag every Republican criticism of the election process with disinformation notices allow Biden to keep making this claim without a single fact check.
Moreover, most outlets simply repeat the administration’s contention the executive orders are aimed at “curbing gun violence.” This is highly debatable. It would be like the media uncritically repeating the GOP claim that their laws are making elections secure. Biden, after all, was in Monterey Park, California, where none of the laws he’s proposing would have deterred the shooter.
The anti-gun group Giffords already gives California an “A” rating.” The state has “universal” background checks and 10-day waiting period limit for handgun purchases and “assault rifle bans” and “red flag” laws that allow police to confiscate guns – and many other regulations that do little but leave innocent people defenseless.
Then again, the only person Biden is trying to save with this rhetoric is himself.
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