The New Republic isn't exactly going to trip over itself to publish something in favor of the Second Amendment. That's not how they roll and I at least appreciate knowing where they come from with their biases. It's so much more refreshing than the mainstream media, even if the bias is pretty much the same thing.

But that doesn't mean they deserve a pass when they make idiotic suggestions, particularly to presidential candidates running for office.

Guns are set to be a major issue in the upcoming election, at least if the media gets their way about it. Immigration is set to be an even bigger one, and while we don't normally talk about immigration here for what should be pretty obvious reasons, we're going to talk a bit about it today.

Why?

Because the New Republic thinks Vice President Kamala Harris should reframe immigration as a gun control issue.

This strategy is long overdue from the Democratic Party, which has tended to dither in the face of Trump’s border fearmongering. But Harris can do more to seize control of the immigration narrative. She can co-opt Trump’s signature issue by talking about border control—in terms of gun control.

Immigrants aren’t coming en masse from “prisons” and “insane asylums,” as Trump claims. They’re fleeing violence in their home countries spurred by the largely unfettered flow of U.S. firearms.

...

So let’s talk about bullets. In the wake of his assassination attempt, Trump now falls into the same category as many of the immigrants he’s been scapegoating: survivors of underregulated guns.

An iron river of U.S. firearms has flowed south for decades, causing unprecedented levels of bloodshed across Latin America in defiance of the region’s strict gun laws. In Mexico, which has just one gun store and requires months of background checks, about 70 percent of weapons found at crime scenes have been traced to the U.S., for example. More than half a million U.S. guns are trafficked into Mexico annually, according to that country’s estimates. The Mexican government is even suing U.S. gun manufacturers for $10 billion, accusing them of knowingly flooding the country with weapons. Although undocumented immigrants come from an increasing array of nations, the majority still come from Latin America, with the largest number of immigrants coming from Mexico, followed by Venezuela.

We can’t have border control without gun control. If Harris and every major Democrat beat the drum about this as often as the Republican Party spews hate against immigrants, Trump could lose arguably his most potent ammunition.

Except that we had border control at a far greater level before the Biden administration took office. In fact, before COVID, we were seeing a regular drop in illegal immigration as a whole, at levels well below what we'd seen for years, and that was without any gun control at all.

Now, I get the argument here. If guns aren't flowing south then people won't flee cartel violence by going north.

However, that's premised on the idea that if we somehow cut off gun sales here, cartels wouldn't find another source for guns elsewhere. That's not a claim that's the least bit supportable. After all, drugs are pretty much illegal everywhere and the cartels don't have a problem getting their hands on that, now do they?

Moreover, they're also ignoring that it's already illegal to ship guns into other countries as it is without specific authorizations which none of these gun runners are getting. The same is true for the illegal straw purchases being made in many cases which provides the guns for smuggling in the first place.

In other words, gun control laws are failing left and right, so why should we restrict our rights to solve a problem elsewhere?

Further, let's also remember that illegal immigration isn't a new problem. Some of us are old enough to remember Reagan talking about addressing the issue at the border, and it wasn't particularly new then, either. Yet cartel violence, at least at the levels most people are thinking of when they talk about it, is relatively new.

In other words, if the cartels vanished entirely, we'd still have people crossing that border.

That doesn't get into the failed Biden policies--which Kamala Harris was apparently in charge of handling--that have led to the explosion in illegal immigration. 

Yes, those asked why they're coming into the US are going to give you answers like "fleeing violence" because they figure that'll garner the most sympathy from Americans. They need that sympathy and saying they live in a poor nation and being part of the bottom 10 percent of income earners here is better than their chances in their home nations might not get as much.

So frankly, the folks at the New Republic can offer all the advice they want, but if Harris follows it, it's not going to work out the way they think it will.