Aren’t Gun Rights a Valid Presidential Debate Topic?

While Thursday night’s presidential debate was agonizing for many Americans to watch, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump did address some important issues ranging from our porous southern border to abortion to the downward spiraling economy.

What was glaringly absent, however, was any discussion of gun control and the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms.

Call me cynical, but I believe that was by design. CNN, which hosted the debate, is a media standard bearer for all things gun control. In fact, the network hasn’t seen a restrictive gun proposal that it hasn’t embraced. And both Biden and Trump have spoken out often on the matter, just like they have on other issues, leaving little doubt where they stand on the right to bear arms.

Perhaps they thought he might spout off one of the standard soundbites he has used multiple times in the past. Phrases like, “Deer don’t wear Kevlar vests,” (duh!) and, “Nobody could own a cannon during the Civil War period,” (an outright lie) don’t engender a lot of trust in a leader. And such answers would likely have drawn a quick—and probably humorous—response from Trump.

Perhaps CNN was worried he would say something about “military-grade assault weapons” when talking about common semi-automatic rifles, or even that the firearm industry is the “only industry in America that has immunity”—both well-debunked falsehoods. Or maybe they thought he’d revert to the old chestnuts that you don’t need: “20, 30, 40, 50 clips in a weapon”, “magazines that can hold multiple bullets in them” or a “magazine with 100 clips in it.”

Fact is, Biden is quite possibly the most anti-gun president in history, as well as arguably the worst. Of course, we’ve chronicled his anti-gun schemes many, many times here at TTAG.

He wants to ban common guns and magazines, let gun companies be sued into oblivion for criminal use of their legally made and marketed products and make a background check mandatory even for private gun sales between family and friends. His ATF has made things so difficult for gun dealers that many have left the business to avoid persecution, and he even created a so-called White House Office for Gun Violence Prevention to help enable anti-gun state legislators to push his gun-ban schemes at the state level.

While I can’t say Trump was the most pro-gun president in history, except for the ill-conceived bump stock ban, he was a pretty good friend to gun owners. And his federal judicial nominations at the circuit court level and to the U.S. Supreme Court have enabled many Second Amendment victories that we wouldn’t have won with a Democrat in the White House instead of Trump.

His recent speech at the NRA Annual Meetings and Exhibits in Dallas gives us some food for thought.

“Let there be no doubt, the survival of our Second Amendment is very much on the ballot,” Trump told the crowd gathered there. “We need the [Second Amendment] for safety. Because you know the bad guys are not giving up their guns…

“The NRA has stood with me from the very beginning. And with your vote I will stand strong for your rights and liberties.”

In the end, questions about gun control, like questions about nearly anything else, would have been losing questions for the sitting president. And while the debate was a pretty fair one, CNN chose to avoid asking Biden about his gun policies because it likely would have made him look even worse.

That omission is a true tragedy in a day and time when advocates of freedom constantly battle at all levels of government to retain our right to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment. Many people I know are one-issue voters. And that issue—a very important one to many people—wasn’t even discussed Thursday night.