President Joe Biden delivered a speech yesterday in response to the Uvalde school shooting that can be summed up in one sentence: “I don’t trust you.”
There are at least 20 million so-called “assault rifles” in the US, and in proposing to ban these weapons, Biden and his supporters are purporting that the very presence of guns causes people to be violent — that in the absence of laws making it illegal for us to kill each other, we will all inevitably become mass shooters. An assault weapons ban and increased background checks are the only things, they say, capable of stopping us from becoming one of the demented gunmen who inflict tragedy and evil on our world.
Biden’s rhetoric is demeaning and offensive, a slap in the face to responsible gun owners, who are the only ones these laws will affect.
“We must at least raise the age to be able to purchase [a rifle] to twenty-one,” he said during his speech. “For the children we’ve lost, the children we can save, for the nation we love, let’s hear the call and the cry. Let’s meet the moment. Let us finally do something.”
The “us” he is asking to “do something” constitutes the millions of law-abiding gun owners who use their firearms responsibly. And the “something” he is asking us to do is to lay our loaded weapons on the bed and willingly handcuff ourselves to a radiator while an armed robber storms our house, because an armed robber stormed our house yesterday.
There are more guns (an estimated 393 million) than people in the US. Under Biden’s guns-breed-violence “logic,” this would mean rampant gun crime everywhere you turn. I recall speaking to a British man at the Shooting Hunting Outdoors Tradeshow a few years ago. It was his first trip to the US, and he expressed to me how surprisingly safe he felt. He had been under the impression that he’d be witness to blatant violence in the streets and was relieved to find that wasn’t the case.
Another European I met recently asked if it would be safe to walk the streets here. “Will I be shot?” he asked nervously. Though a little amusing, these perceptions represent a serious indoctrination effort that’s been successful in the UK and elsewhere and is a creed the Democrats are intent on bolstering in America.
Biden’s problem is, of course, that Americans are generally very trustworthy, even without laws controlling our behavior. “About 92 percent of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms,” crime prevention researcher John Lott found. According to recent FBI data, fists and feet kill more people than any kind of rifle. If America were the murderous place the media purports it to be, you’d think those two million illegal immigrants would be headed back the other way, rather than risking their lives to come here.
The vast majority of people who own guns buy them for self-defense and know how to handle and store them. They don’t like to be told, “You’re not allowed to own that firearm anymore, because you might do something bad with it someday.” Actually, more than simply not being a violent threat, many of these gun owners actively prevent crime, to the point that the FBI itself acknowledged in 2018 that the “selfless actions” of armed citizens “likely saved many lives” and that “the enhanced threat posed by active shooters and the swiftness with which active shooter incidents unfold support the importance of preparation by law enforcement officers and citizens alike.”
Gun sales have surged in the past few years. In 2020, Americans bought a record 22.8 million guns; in 2021, they purchased 19.9 million more. Has violent gun crime surged, too, in a corresponding fashion? No.
A Guardian article reported in 2021:
Through July of last year, there was no clear association between the increase in firearm purchases and the increase in most interpersonal gun violence at the state level, according to a new study published in Injury Epidemiology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Rather than pointing the finger at guns, the study’s author told the Guardian, “We need to be looking at other factors, like job loss, economic change, the closure of schools and community organizations and nonprofits, and civil unrest.”
What’s more, as government trusts its citizens more, they are more inclined to take responsibility for themselves. Constitutional Carry is the concept that law-abiding citizens shouldn’t have to ask the government for permission (apply for a permit) before exercising their Second Amendment rights. When Constitutional Carry took effect in Texas, the demand for firearms training classes skyrocketed. When West Virginia said it trusted its residents to carry a gun without a permission slip, the state’s violent crime rate dropped. In fact, the top three safest states in America require no permit for the law-abiding to carry a firearm. Constitutional Carry legislation has been a winning policy gaining huge traction in recent years: half of the United States have enacted these types of laws.
We shouldn’t need all these facts and figures to prove that guns are not what cause violence, any more than access to matches turns someone into an arson. As gunslinger Alan Ladd says in Shane, “A gun is a tool, no better or no worse than any other tool: an ax, a shovel or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it.”
Judging from Biden’s massive gun control policy wish list, he thinks every American is bad.
