Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
When Joe Biden declared during his address to Congress and the country—as quoted by The Hill—that, “We need a ban on assault weapons and high capacity again. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. We did it before and it worked,” he evidently didn’t count on people listening who knew better.
One of those people was the National Review’s David Harsanyi, and he quickly blew the whistle on Biden’s prevarication.
“Biden is insinuating that once the Federal Assault Weapons Ban sunsetted in 2004,” Harsanyi writes, “gun violence skyrocketed. It simply wasn’t so. The rate of gun homicide continued falling for more than a decade after the ban ended, even though gun ownership exploded.”
At approximately 56 minutes and 40 seconds into his speech, Biden also repeated the canard—off script according to the official White House transcript—“From the very beginning, there were certain guns, weapons that could not be owned by Americans.”
However, as far back as June 30 of last year, Politifact was calling Biden out on this assertion. Several historians and even the Biden campaign were contacted. Here’s what Politifact wrote at the time: “The campaign was unable to come up with an example of a law banning private ownership of cannons, and historians of the period doubt that any existed. To the contrary, there are documented instances of privateers, or privately owned vessels, setting sail with cannons during the period.”
“We rate the statement False.”
Biden’s assertion that he does not want to “become confrontational” is a head-shaker because it is precisely what he is doing by calling for a ban on an entire class of firearms which, incidentally, are routinely mischaracterized as “weapons of war.” The so-called “assault weapons” he wants banned are semiautomatic modern sporting rifles and they are the most popular long gun in America today. Millions of them are privately owned, meaning they are “in common use,” by people who have harmed nobody, or the crime statistics would show it.
Check any FBI Uniform Crime Report over the past several years and one thing immediately becomes clear. Rifles of any kind—including semi-autos—are used in a fraction of all homicides. More people are murdered in any given year with knives or blunt instruments than with rifles, according to the data. One might ask, why is Biden so insistent on a ban?
Perhaps the answer is found in an April 4, 1996, Washington Post column authored by the late Charles Krauthammer.
“Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic — purely symbolic — move in that direction,” he observed. “Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.”
Another point Harsanyi makes in his National Review article is that during the period when homicides were declining, gun ownership soared.
This is hardly the first time Biden has been caught in a fib about firearms. Earlier this month, he earned two “Pinocchios” from Washington Post Fact-Checker Glenn Kessler, which was also reported by AmmoLand News.
The push may be on in Biden’s administration to enact more gun control laws because of the Supreme Court’s announcement it will review a challenge to New York’s carry permit law. The anti-gun community is fearful of a floodgate opening on Second Amendment cases with a presumably conservative majority ready to eradicate restrictive gun control laws. This is one reason Capitol Hill liberals have been talking about packing the Supreme Court.
Some states are already acting in response to Biden’s executive actions on guns. In Idaho, a House panel earlier this week “approved legislation intended to head off a half-dozen executive actions from President Joe Biden,” the East Idaho News reported. The state passed legislation back in 2014 preventing enforcement of federal actions “that infringe upon Second Amendment rights,” the newspaper said.
This new legislation would prevent enforcement of Biden’s executive actions, and it has already been passed by the State Senate.
The president can make any claim he wishes about not being confrontational, but clearly the “confrontation” has already started, and he’s not going to help the issue by repeating falsehoods.