Gun Control Advocates Evaluate Biden's Tenure

AP Photo/Matt Slocum

President Joe Biden is on his way out the door. I'm pretty sure he's unaware of this fact, of course, or any facts really--I won't be surprised to see him move from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to an assisted living facility--but whether he is or not doesn't really matter to us at this point. He's going to be gone from office and now that the election is settled, we know who is next.

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And it won't be someone interested in continuing his anti-gun policies.

However, it's probably too much to think that anti-gun activists would acknowledge that fact as well as them admitting that nothing he did made a damn bit of difference.

But they're talking about Biden's legacy on guns, and they're convinced he did all that he could.

President Joe Biden campaigned for the Oval Office on promises of sweeping gun reform. While some of his proposals never materialized, his administration will leave behind a bevy of initiatives meant to aid law enforcement, prevent shootings, and crack down on rogue gun sellers and traffickers. 

Now, as the president prepares to leave the White House on January 20, gun violence prevention advocates and political experts are taking stock of his record. 

“It’s clear that Biden has been by far the strongest gun safety president in American history,” said Emma Brown, the executive director of the gun violence prevention group Giffords. “He has made a critical contribution in the fight to end this epidemic in this country.” 

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to nix many of his predecessor’s initiatives, but some advocates hope that the growing national concern over gun violence will force him to shy away from dismantling much of Biden’s legacy on gun reform. 

“People are just tired of these mass shootings,” said Steve Lindley, senior programs and policy manager at Brady United. “The problem is not going away. The statistics are what the statistics are.”

... 

“As president, Biden certainly fell short of where he wanted to be on policy terms with gun violence,” said Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York in Cortland. “But he did remarkably well given the constraints and limitations he faced.”

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Of course, of the gun reform efforts Biden undertook, only the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is something that Trump can't erase with a stroke of the pen.

And with GOP control of Congress, even that law remaining could potentially be threatened.

What none of these people are acknowledging, though, is that all of the gun control pushed into existence by Biden has done less than nothing to deal with our violent crime issues in this country. Granted, we knew it wouldn't, but they've long maintained that it would, that gun control was essential for reducing criminal's access to firearms.

And it hasn't.

In fact, during Biden's tenure, violent crime has been sky-high, all while he sought to make it harder for law-abiding citizens to get firearms. That's because criminals aren't following gun laws anyway. They're doing what they want to do in spite of the laws put in place. That's his real legacy.

Well, that and crapping his pants.

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