On Monday, President Joe Biden announced his administration’s new rules on so-called “ghost guns,” which really just means any firearms without a readable serial number.
After outlining the new rules and announcing his new nominee to head up the ATF, he said it was just the start and called on Congress to act.
President Biden has had incremental success at implementing gun control through executive action, rolling out a rule last year to regulate pistol-stablizing braces, directing his Justice Department to target gun traffickers, and announcing a new crackdown on “ghost guns” Monday.
While the president touted his administration’s actions, he also said that “this should be just the start” and called on Congress to pass laws on gun control, a politically contentious issue that has been deadlocked in the legislature for the past decade.
“We need Congress to pass universal background checks,” Biden said in the Rose Garden on Monday. “And I know it’s controversial, but I got it done once: Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
Oh, wow, that tired old thing.
Yes, Biden did manage to get “assault weapons” banned. Sort of. It really just banned certain features and only if you take “banned” to mean “can’t all be included together.” And yes, 30-round magazines were banned.
But what he didn’t acknowledge is that the ban accomplished absolutely nothing. Nothing at all.
Violent crime–the reason we were told we just had to have a ban–was on the decline even before the law was passed. When it sunset in 2004, rather than the influx of violent crime we were told would happen if it wasn’t renewed, violent crime continued to drop.
He left that part out.
As for universal background checks, let’s remember that criminals don’t undergo them when they buy a gun on the black market, and that’s where most get them from.
Biden continued:
The president also called for Congress to “eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.”
“Gun manufacturers have more immunity from liability than any other American industry, so they have never had to take responsibility for the death and destruction their products cause,” the president said Monday
Of course they do. They need that protection because they’re held responsible for things in ways no other industry is. Honda doesn’t face being sued into oblivion because someone used one of their cars to kill someone.
A gun manufacturer, however, would.
Which is the point. This is really an attempt to create a de facto ban on firearms by making it untenable to manufacture firearms for civilian sale.
Couple that with the new rules regarding so-called ghost guns and Biden is basically trying to make it so we have zero access to guns over time.
However, for all his invocation of Congress, Biden misses one key point. In a lot of this, he’s actually overstepping his regulatory authority. He’s creating new laws out of whole cloth rather than recognizing that authority rests with Congress.
That means many of these new rules will face legal challenge and may well be struck down.
In the meantime, though, Biden will continue to try and suppress our constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.
There’s a chance for a GOP supermajority to come out of the midterm elections. If that happens, the Republican Party can step in and do as they need to override this nonsense once and for all.
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