Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
President Joe Biden is a gun control advocate. We all know this. We’ve heard his rhetoric. Much like others in that space, he likes to talk about “reasonable” measures to curtail so-called gun violence.
However, like Rep. Thomas Massie and Dr. John Lott note in a new op-ed, there’s nothing reasonable about the president when it comes to the Second Amendment.
Fact-checkers keep assuring Americans that President Biden doesn’t want to ban guns, but simply wants “reasonable” gun regulations. Yet judging by the president’s rhetoric, Biden either doesn’t know much about guns (a concerning possibility given his constant push for more regulations) or is calling for a complete ban on the vast majority of guns sold in the U.S.
Just last Thursday, when Biden spoke in New York City about combatting gun crime—not the 92 percent of violent crime that has nothing to do with guns—he focused on handguns. A “Glock with 40 rounds—a magazine with 40 rounds. And it’s really a weapon of war,” he said. “But I don’t see any rationale to why there should be such a weapon able to be purchased.”
And at a CNN town hall last year, Biden remarked, “The idea you need a weapon that can have the ability to fire 20, 30, 40, 50, 120 shots from that weapon—whether it’s a 9-millimeter pistol or whether it’s a rifle—is ridiculous. I’m continuing to push to eliminate the sale of those things.”
At a high-dollar private fundraiser in Seattle in 2019, Biden asked, “Why should we allow people to have military-style weapons including pistols with 9-mm bullets and can hold 10 or more rounds?”
These statements implicate a far wider range of guns than Biden lets on. Any semi-automatic gun, whether it’s a handgun or rifle, “can hold” a magazine of virtually any capacity. In fact, the vast majority of handguns sold in this country are semi-auto handguns. In 2018, almost 3.9 million semi-automatic handguns were manufactured in the U.S., compared to less than 700,000 revolvers. So, about 85 percent of all handguns made were semi-automatics that “can hold” magazines.
In other words, while his comments look reasonable to those who know nothing about firearms, in reality, they’re anything but.
What Biden is clear about is that it’s his desire to ban pretty much anything semi-automatic firearm.
For some, that’s a worthy goal. After all, they’re terrified of semi-automatic weapons and think they’re meant for the battlefield.
However, semi-automatic weapons have been around for more than a century at this point. It’s only been recently people have claimed there was some horrific issue with these types of weapons and urged people like Biden to ban them.
What they want is to push things so you’re basically forced to use the same basic weapons available in the Old West, which is ironic considering how they claim any restoration of gun rights will take us back to those days.
Semi-automatic weapons aren’t especially dangerous.
What is dangerous, though, is this idea that we should ban an entire category of weapons and call that a reasonable step that we should all apparently be able to get behind.
If that’s how Biden defines a reasonable move, what does he want to do but thinks might be going too far?
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2022/02/14/bidens-rhetoric-n55425