It's amazing how many journalists still claim there's no inherent bias in the media, while every publication of any community above a few thousand seems to have an anti-gun editorial board.
I'm not talking about the odd op-ed, because those are the opinions of individuals that may or may not reflect the publication's management's views. The editorial board is a clearer representation of those views, though.
The Las Vegas Sun's board, for example, just published an editorial where they try to claim that President Trump's focus on law and order rings hollow for them because he's making pro-gun moves.
For all the slogans about law and order, the Trump administration’s actions tell a very different story. Less than two years into Donald Trump’s second term as president, his administration has systematically dismantled safeguards that were designed to keep firearms out of dangerous hands while weakening the very agencies and programs responsible for preventing gun violence. The result is a reckless agenda that places the desires of the most extreme gun-rights activists ahead of the basic right of families to live in safe neighborhoods and go to church, a movie, a concert or any other public place without fear of being gunned down.
This past weekend alone, as the nation celebrated our 250th birthday, at least 43 people lost their lives to gun violence, according to the Gun Violence Archive. To provide a comparison, that’s almost double the number of civilians killed in large-scale missile attacks in Ukraine this past weekend. When it comes to the death toll, gun violence has transformed the streets of the United States into a war zone.
Yet none of this seems to bother Trump or the gun rights activists backing the GOP.
Last year, Trump made his priorities clear by rolling back accountability for federally licensed gun dealers who repeatedly violate the law. The change makes it more difficult for regulators to revoke licenses even when dealers falsify records, fail to conduct background checks or sell firearms to prohibited buyers such as violent felons. Honest gun dealers have nothing to fear from meaningful oversight. Those who repeatedly ignore the law should not be rewarded with weaker enforcement.
Ah, the old "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" line from people who didn't bother to actually talk to anyone who got jammed up by zero tolerance over abbreviations, miscalculations of what "three-day wait" meant precisely, or any of a thousand other trivial mistakes that got people's licenses taken away.
The ATF could always go after bad actors. They did it regularly, too. They didn't need a zero-tolerance policy to do that. The policy just told them not to allow honest mistakes to be corrected and to treat them like a willful violation.
The contradiction becomes even more glaring when the administration boasts about falling crime rates. What they fail to mention is that crime rates have been falling since the Biden administration and Trump is dismantling the very policies, programs and enforcement strategies that helped drive those improvements.
Of course, the violent crime rate has fallen since the Biden years, though that was likely more of a correction from the spike during the pandemic, often driven by leftist civil unrest. But fair is fair. It started during the Biden years and has continued.
Those policies, though, had nothing to do with the drop in violent crime, because even the ATF will tell you that very few licensed dealers are knowingly providing guns to criminals. If they are, they're more careful with their paperwork than someone who abbreviates a county when they shouldn't.
What the editorial board fails to note, though, is that their anti-gun buddies swore that violent crime was going to rise after the Bruen decision upended the whole "may issue" permitting nonsense. More guns are on the streets than ever before, and the violent crime rate not only failed to increase, but it had the single-year biggest drop in recorded history.
Trump has plenty to crow about, especially as his enforcement of immigration law has put a lot of recidivist felons on planes back to their home countries, where they can be a problem without impacting American citizens on a daily basis.
There's nothing hollow about that, and actually respecting gun rights is going to help keep people safe.
The police can't be everywhere, even if they wanted. Frankly, that's not desirable anyway, since I don't want to live in a police state, and even those Flock cameras are too much for me. Because they can't, though, I'm going to make absolutely certain I have the means to protect myself and my family from the dangerous people around me.
That's maintaining law and order, even when the police can't be there.
Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.
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