I’m not going to lie, it’s tedious constantly pointing out the same dishonest contentions of the anti-gun left. The nation would probably take Joe Biden’s gun demagoguery more seriously if the president and his staff occasionally cooked up some new material. Because last night’s plea for more gun control was a rehashing of the same archaic policy ideas, bad analogies, and lies that Democrats tend to drop after every shooting.
The Second Amendment Isn’t ‘Absolute’
The president, as he almost always does, began with this strawman. The Second Amendment, Biden claimed, “like all other rights, is not absolute.” (All? Fans of the 13th Amendment might find this a bit surprising.) There are, of course, already tens of thousands of laws governing individual gun ownership in the United States. More laws and regulations exist restricting the Second Amendment than any other right in the Constitution, and it’s not particularly close. “Voting rights” advocates treat photo ID laws as if they were tantamount to fascism. Well, practicing your right to self-defense is contingent on an FBI background check.
Indeed, the notion that gun ownership is “absolute” would not mesh with the experiences of those living in a blue city like Baltimore, (58.27 homicides per 100,000), Washington D.C. (23.52), or Chicago (18.26), where, despite the Heller and McDonald decisions further codifying the individual right to own firearms, legally purchasing a handgun remains unconstitutionally challenging.
Biden also made the debatable claim that in the decade the “assault weapon” ban was in force, mass shootings went down. “But after Republicans let the law expire in 2004, and those weapons were allowed to be sold again, mass shootings tripled,” Biden said. “Those are the facts.” You won’t be surprised to learn that they’re not.
Unmentioned by Biden is the fact that after the “assault weapon ban” sunset in 2004, gun crimes kept precipitously dropping. In the 15 years immediately following the sunsetting, overall homicides fell 10 out of 15 years. Twenty-one years after gun violence peaked in 1993, and a decade after the assault weapon ban ended, homicides by firearms hit the lowest point since 1976. By that time, the AR-15 had become the most popular rifle in the country. (A 1999 Justice Department study also found that the ban failed “to reduce the average number of victims per gun murder incident or multiple gunshot wound victims.”)