Rallying behind former Vice President Joe Biden, America’s left-sliding Democrats are ready to elect what the gun prohibition lobby is calling “the strongest gun safety ticket in American history.”
Translation: Despite efforts to portray Biden as someone who supports the Second Amendment while just wanting to ban the most popular rifle in the country, his agenda—as reported by the Seattle P-I.com and Associated Press—may as well have been written by anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety, according to gun rights activists.
One thing that seems to have alarmed some people in the firearms community is an observation by Chris Wallace at Fox News that displayed a disappointing lack of knowledge about the guns Biden hopes to prohibit.
“I understand that Republicans will say that Joe Biden wants to take away your Second Amendment rights,” Wallace said Wednesday. “The only problem with that is, Biden has made it clear over and over [that] he’s not interested in taking away Second Amendment rights, he’s interested in taking away weapons of mass destruction like assault weapons.”
Veteran journalist Wallace should know better. The so-called “assault weapons” Biden wants to ban are owned by millions of law-abiding citizens who have harmed nobody, a fact borne out by a quick glance at the annual FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Traditionally, rifles of any kind are used in a fraction of all homicides in this country in any given year.
These are rifles, and pistols, built on the AR-15 platform. There are so many millions of such firearms in private hands that there are only estimates of the total number, and those estimates vary by as many as five million guns. The consensus is anywhere from 12 to 17 million, and some estimates run a bit higher.
What’s more, according to people who own one or more semiautomatic modern sporting rifles, they’re not truly military-grade weapons at all. They may look like military firearms, but they are not.
The only known definition of such guns was written into Washington State’s gun control Initiative 1639 in 2018. It applies to “semiautomatic assault rifles” and is written to broadly include very semi-auto rifle that has ever been manufactured anywhere on earth. Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich noted repeatedly to reporters that the so-called “semiautomatic assault rifle” is a firearm that really doesn’t exist anywhere but on paper. He asserted in early 2019 the only reason that definition was inserted into the initiative was to make it possible for anti-gunners to use the language to ban a whole class of firearms at some future date.
Democrats were treated to a short video appearance by former Congresswoman Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords, who was wounded and partly disabled during a shooting at a Tucson, Ariz., mall several years ago. Since recovering from her wounds, Giffords has become a staunch gun control advocate.
In her video, Giffords insists, “We must elect Joe Biden. He was there for me. He’ll be there for you, too.”
According to the Seattle P-I.com story, “Biden wants to repeal a law shielding firearm manufacturers from liability lawsuits, impose universal background checks for purchases and ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high capacity magazines.”
That said, any contention by Biden, the DNC or anyone in the media that Biden is not a gun banner loses all credibility. He wants to ban an entire class of firearms, and the late Charles Krauthammer summed up that notion in April 1996, when he wrote, “Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic — purely symbolic — move in that direction. 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.”
While the 2008 Heller and 2010 McDonald Supreme Court rulings might stand in the way of total confiscation, it appears clear to Second Amendment activists that Democrats led by Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris hope to relegate the right to keep and bear arms to the level of heavily-regulated government privilege.
