Speaking about the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, Joe Biden wondered why anyone would want to own an AR-15 sporting rifle, and, following the advice of former Obama administration torpedo Rahm Emanuel, didn’t let the crisis go to waste.
Thus did the president of the United States called millions of Americans potential murderers because they own semi-automatic rifles.
Along with blaming the law-abiding “gun lobby” for killings perpetrated by homicidal maniacs, that’s been the narrative mantra of the Democrats and their leftist Media Information Ministry for some time. People who enjoy hunting or target-shooting with sporting rifles “just want to kill.”
Biden didn’t disappoint the gun-grabbers even if his hackneyed anti-gun speech wasn’t all that original.
But Biden also fouled up history again when he claimed that the government prohibited owning certain weapons even when Congress ratified the Second Amendment in 1791.
Upshot: Biden knows less about guns than he does about history.
You Just Want to Kill Someone
After the obligatory fake concern for the families in Uvalde, Biden asked when “are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
“We all” don’t “know in our gut” what “needs to be done,” or at least not what Biden knows in his gut needs to be done, but that small fact aside, next came the list of mass shootings and his risible claim that gun laws “work.”
“I am sick and tired of it,” Biden continued:
We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.
I spent my career as a senator and as Vice President working to pass common-sense gun laws. We can’t and won’t prevent every tragedy. But we know they work and have a positive impact. When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.
Again, we don’t know that “common-sense gun laws” work for the simple reason that they don’t work, as the crime rates in such benighted cities as Chicago well show.
But Biden plodded along, then delivered the accusation that a man or woman who owns an AR-15 or other semi-automatic rifle just wants to kill people:
The idea that an 18-year-old kid can walk into a gun store and buy two assault weapons is just wrong.
What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone?
Deer aren’t running through the forest with Kevlar vests on, for God’s sake. It’s just sick.
And the gun manufacturers have spent two decades aggressively marketing assault weapons which make them the most and largest profit.…
Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it and stand up to the lobbies?
It’s time to turn this pain into action.
“F” in History
To his credit, Biden didn’t equate the Uvalde gunman’s victims to career criminal and drug addict George Floyd, or to teenage thug Trayvon Martin. That was a job for Biden’s former boss, Barack Hussein Obama.
But Biden did get close with this brazen, despicable, racialized lie: “Black Americans wake up knowing they could lose their life in the course of just living their life today — simply jogging, shopping, sleeping at home.”
So he did try to politicize the mass shooting, just as fake Hispanic Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke did when he crashed a conference about it. Police tossed him out.
After the attack on sport-rifle owners, Biden falsely claimed that the Second Amendment limited firearms ownership.
“When it was passed, you couldn’t own a — you couldn’t own a cannon, you couldn’t own certain kinds of weapons. It’s just — there’s always been limitations,” he said. “But guess what? These actions we’ve taken before, they saved lives. And they can do it again.”
Giving Biden’s limited knowledge of firearms themselves, his ignorance of history and the Second Amendment is unsurprising.
The claim “is factually and legally untrue,” Democrat law professor Jonathan Turley wrote:
There were no federal laws barring cannon ownership when the Second Amendment was enacted. Gun laws remained local matters and I do not know of any bans on cannons or other gun types until much later in our history. Early local laws did control concealed weapons, though concealed cannons were not part of those ordinances.
Indeed, the Constitution itself supports private cannon ownership in the case of privateers. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 allows Congress to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal.” That allowed private parties to privateer on the high seas with … cannons. (Recently some members of Congress wanted to issue such letters of Marque again to enlist privateers in the fight against Russia).
As with the failure to acknowledge the limitations on the range of legislative options due to Second Amendment protections, President Biden is undermining efforts to reach common ground with this repeated false claim. If we are going to reach what the President calls “commonsense” responses to this massacre, we must start from a common understanding of the constitutional and historical foundations for such reforms.
H/T: Breitbart
