President Joe Biden is still pushing gun control, but he still can’t be bothered to put forward a proposal that would have any real effect on gun crime or gun violence.
Biden spent a section of his address to Congress going over all the same stale gun-control notes that he pushed earlier in the year. He mentioned the Atlanta spa shooting and the shooting in Boulder, Colorado, and failed to propose anything that would have prevented either shooting (again). He only had talking point after talking point, some of which were based entirely on falsehoods.
Take his point about the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. “In the early 2000s, the law expired, and we’ve seen daily bloodshed since,” Biden said, before adding, “I’m not saying if the law continued, we wouldn’t see bloodshed.”
But the law didn’t continue, and we didn’t see “bloodshed.” The Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004, gun ownership soared, and homicides actually fell. As for so-called assault weapons, 364 of the 10,258 gun homicides in 2019 were committed with rifles, according to the FBI. It’s handguns, not “assault weapons,” that make up the clear majority of gun homicides in the United States.
For all the jokes Biden cracks about deer wearing Kevlar vests, he could spend more time actually learning about the issue. Instead, Biden prides himself on his ignorance, noting after the shooting in Boulder that he didn’t know anything about the shooter, his motive, or the weapons he used, and he didn’t need to know those things in order to push more gun control.
Whether it’s closing the “Charleston loophole,” which doesn’t exist, or pushing for universal background checks, which address a small percentage of gun crime, Biden’s positions on gun control are focused far more on law-abiding gun owners than on the “bloodshed” he claims to be concerned about. And it seems that people recognize this.
As fickle as polling can be, support for prioritizing “enacting new laws to reduce gun violence” over protecting the right to own guns has dropped 7 points since a 2018 high following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Even with that favorable framing, gun control can only win over 50% of voters, and that’s before the specifics of any plan inevitably scare away more even more.
Biden isn’t likely to move the ball on gun control, with slim majorities in both chambers of Congress and looking at a country that saw record gun sales and new gun owners during the pandemic and the riots that plagued some American cities. That just leaves him to push partisan talking points that show just how little he would actually do to combat gun violence.
