Biden Gun Ban Not The Only Threat In Congress

With President Joe Biden calling on Congress to enact his gun ban along with universal background checks and the repeal of the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the Second Amendment Foundation’s Alan Gottlieb says that Democrats’ are moving forward with an agenda that puts the right to keep and bear arms at risk. Gottlieb joins me on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co. to discuss the president’s call to disarm and how the 2A community is responding.

Biden’s statement on the third anniversary of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was long on rhetoric and short on facts, billing the gun control battle as a generational fight pitting young Americans against their elders, while ignoring the constitutional and pragmatic objections to his anti-gun agenda.

The Parkland students and so many other young people across the country who have experienced gun violence are carrying forward the history of the American journey. It is a history written by young people in each generation who challenged prevailing dogma to demand a simple truth: we can do better. And we will.

This Administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call. We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer. Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets. We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change. The time to act is now.

As Gottlieb argues, taken in totality Biden’s gun control agenda amounts to a full-scale attack on the right to keep and bear arms; banning some of the most commonly-owned firearms and magazines in the United States, imposing a background check law that could criminalize ordinary transfers of firearms between family and friends, and giving the green light to junk lawsuits designed to bankrupt the firearms industry.

But Gottlieb notes that these aren’t the only bad ideas offered by anti-gun Democrats. There’s HB 127, which would impose insurance mandates on all gun owners, establish a publicly searchable database of gun owners, and require gun owners to undergo psychological testing before they could receive permission from the federal government to purchase a firearm.

Additionally, Gottlieb says he believes that the Biden administration will soon unveil executive orders dealing with gun control, including an attempt to force the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to re-define firearms to include unfinished frames and receivers. Not only would that turn existing law on its head, it could open up huge legal risks to any hobbyist who has built their own firearm from scratch.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation is also speaking out about Biden’s call for Congress to start work on his anti-gun agenda. The firearms industry trade group says that Biden’s plan targets legal gun owners instead of dealing with the reality of violent crime.

His demand that Congress ban the modern sporting rifle (MSR), which he knowingly mislabels an “assault rifle” and “weapon of war,” denies the reality that more murders are committed with knives, fists and clubs than all rifles combined. Over 20 million MSRs are in circulation today, used daily for lawful purposes.

President Biden’s call to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a law passed with wide bipartisan support, panders to the radical base of his party. Rolling it back would be akin to allowing activist lawyers to sue Ford for the wrongful deaths caused by drunk drivers.

The criminal responsible for the horrors thrust on Parkland, and the nation, must be held accountable for his crimes. Anything less is a whitewash of the failures of local, state and federal authorities to act on any of the 45 instances of warnings, tips and police responses prior to his final terrible crimes.

Of course, we can object as much as we want, but our lawmakers are the ones who really need to be hearing from us at the moment. In addition, Gottlieb agrees that it’s up to gun owners to educate our friends, family, co-workers, and others who don’t own firearms and don’t know many details about these proposals on why they’re such a bad idea.

We can’t expect the media or anti-gun politicians to do that for us. Instead, they’re busy crafting a narrative that these infringements on our civil rights are just “common sense” items that won’t have any negative impact whatsoever on legal gun owners, when in reality the anti-gun agenda of Joe Biden and his allies in Congress would criminalize a constitutionally-protected right.