Following the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, we knew there would be a renewed push for gun control. There wasn’t much after Buffalo, but the murder of 19 kids and two teachers was too much for anyone. The anti-Second Amendment crowd locked on and started pushing once again.

On Thursday night, President Joe Biden addressed the nation to offer his plan.

President Joe Biden issued a fervent appeal Thursday for stricter gun laws — including a ban on assault weapons, tougher background check laws and a higher minimum age of purchase — as a spate of gun massacres have left the nation shaken and prompted new discussions on Capitol Hill about how to prevent them.

Speaking from the White House Cross Hall, where somber lines of candles had been lit as a backdrop, Biden ratcheted up pressure on Congress to act after previous shootings failed to produce any meaningful new laws.

“How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” Biden asked, demanding Republicans in particular end their blockade of gun control votes.

…

In addition to reinstating a ban on assault weapons, Biden urged Congress to expand background check requirements for gun purchases, create new rules for safely storing weapons, enact new “red flag” laws that would prevent gun sales to those with criminal records, repeal liability shields for gun manufacturers and provide more mental health services for students.

Most, if not all, of those items currently appear unlikely to gain approval in the evenly divided Senate, where a bipartisan group of senators is currently determining where action might be possible.

Nothing in there was really surprising.

Oddly, the mental health services for students is probably the least controversial thing Biden mentioned during the address.

But what about the rest?

To be clear, absolutely none of this is new. We’ve seen this and addressed all of these in the past. We’ve noted that age limits treat 18-year-olds as second-class citizens, for example, and leave many of them vulnerable to crime. After all, they’re old enough to live alone, but not to have the means to defend themselves?

Background check laws are largely irrelevant since none of the mass shooters I can recall purchased the firearm they used without such a check. I fail to see how expanding them will stop people who can pass such checks.

Assault weapon bans sound great, but how do they seek to define an assault weapon? Most in Congress have no clue what is and what isn’t an “assault weapon” in the first place, so they focus on cosmetic features because that’s all they know how to identify one with.

Or they go too far in the other direction and ban semi-automatic firearms which knock out an insane number of guns in private hands that literally no one would classify as so-called assault weapons.

Biden also wants a ban on so-called high-capacity magazines, but it should be noted that while these are vilified routinely, the Parkland killer only had 10-round magazines for his weapon. It seems the Virginia Tech killer had the same limit on at least one of the handguns he used.

Honestly, each and every one of these measures is something that we’ve debunked, knocked down, or discredited at some point or another, yet here is Biden, pushing them as if they’re the most common sense things in the world.

The problem is that gun control isn’t the answer. There is something fundamentally broken in our society, something we have to address now if we hope to put a stop to these kinds of attacks.

Yet we’re not allowed to have that conversation. We’re not allowed to look deeper into these things because we might find out something that Democrats don’t like.

So, instead, we debate our rights as if they’re not, you know, our rights.

More than that, though, we’re supposed to trust him that this will be the end of it, that this will make everything better. This is a man who acted like a 9mm was a bazooka, for crying out loud. Does anyone think he won’t be after those next?

Of course he will, which is why it’s imperative we hold Republican feet to the fire on this one.