President Joe Biden seems to be inclined to call for gun control every time something goes the slightest bit wrong. I drop a pot in the kitchen? Call for gun control. My wife stubs her toe? Gun control.

It's a bit of a meme at this point.

However, because he's the president, his calls for gun control in the aftermath of things like the shooting in Charlotte, NC that claimed the lives of four law enforcement officers is something we can't really just blow off.

Much as we may wish to.

An op-ed writer in North Carolina, however, stepped in to address some of Biden's calls in the aftermath of Charlotte and why they're just plain stupid.

In his April 29 statement, for example, Joe Biden called the officers “fallen heroes.” Yes, they are.

But the president also said this: “We must do more to protect our law enforcement officers. That means funding them — so they have the resources they need to do their jobs and keep us safe. And it means taking additional action to combat the scourge of gun violence. Now. Leaders in Congress need to step up so that we ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require safe storage of guns, and pass universal background checks and a national red flag law. Enough is enough.”

...

The hands of habitual felon Terry Clark Hughes certainly had no business holding firearms of any kind. But it was already illegal for him to do so. That was one of the main reasons the officers were there to arrest him in the first place.

As for the funding of state and federal law enforcement, I see no evidence it played any role here. Safe storage of guns? While the North Carolina General Assembly has already legislated on this matter, it also had no relevance to the case. Nor did the absence of red flag laws (since any report to authorities by family members that he possessed a gun would already have triggered yet another warrant for his arrest) or broader background checks (since he already knew he was precluded from owning a gun and wouldn’t have tried buying firearms from anyone required to use the National Instant Criminal Background Check System).

Now, for most of us, this is old hat. We all know this.

The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't. They literally think that if there had been universal background checks, the killer wouldn't have been able to get a gun. They seem to think that bad guys just buy guns from the average gun-owning citizens on the regular and fail to comprehend that there's an entire black market for the illicit trade of firearms.

Those guys don't do background checks at all.

And red flag laws? How would red flag laws help? The police were rolling up to disarm an armed felon. If there'd been a red flag order...they'd have rolled up to disarm an armed felon. If anything, it might have caused this massacre far sooner.

The real issue here isn't the policy proposals Biden called for in and of themselves. The issue is how people like Biden will use any tragedy as a pretext to call for everything they wanted in the first place. 

We saw the same thing happen in Maine, with anti-gun lawmakers pushing for things like bump stock bans, waiting periods, and universal background checks over a crime that wouldn't have been prevented if all three had previously been on the books.

It's especially amusing that someone thinks a red flag law might have prevented Charlotte but can somehow also prevent suicides. It's hilarious how every anti-gun measure can solve any problem, all while ignoring how it hasn't solved any problems anywhere else.

Biden doesn't actually care about Charlotte. Not, at least, in any way that impacts policy proposals. It's just a useful cudgel to try and use to beat Congress and various states into going along with his anti-gun agenda.