{"id":71123,"date":"2021-08-20T20:57:09","date_gmt":"2021-08-21T01:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=71123"},"modified":"2021-08-20T20:58:13","modified_gmt":"2021-08-21T01:58:13","slug":"71123","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=71123","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Analysis: What Biden\u2019s Afghanistan Disaster Means for Gun Policy<\/a><\/p>\n

When it comes to gun policy, there are two big takeaways I see from the debacle of the past week in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

The first is one that we really didn\u2019t need this disaster in order to learn. It\u2019s one that\u2019s been demonstrated countless times throughout human history. But it\u2019s also one that President Joe Biden has yet to learn: Military superiority doesn\u2019t guarantee victory.<\/p>\n

In June, as he\u2019d done before, the president insisted that resisting a modern military\u2019s overwhelming force is effectively impossible.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose who say the blood of\u2026 \u2018the blood of patriots,\u2019 you know, and all the stuff about how we\u2019re going to have to move against the government,\u201d Biden said\u00a0in a speech<\/a>. \u201cWell, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What\u2019s happened is that there have never been\u2014if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the Taliban have recaptured the whole of Afghanistan without the use of F-15s or nuclear weapons. They did it without ever being capable of taking on the American military in open combat or creating soldiers anywhere near the quality of our own.<\/p>\n

And they are far from the first to do so. The lesson has been taught repeatedly throughout the years. Whether by the Viet Cong or our own Founding Fathers. Many didn\u2019t need a new teacher, let alone one composed of terrorist barbarians\u00a0already imposing their own civilian gun-confiscation scheme<\/a>, to learn this lesson. And I\u2019m not sure President Biden will learn it this time either.<\/p>\n

The second takeaway is a bit more subtle but also more directly applicable to the immediate political situation around guns in America.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s stubborn refusal to change course or even admit any failure in the face of calamity provides further evidence for how he\u2019ll handle the rest of his agenda. Or, at the very least, the parts of his agenda he is particularly invested in personally.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

President Biden has repeatedly put the decision to surrender Afghanistan to the Taliban in personal terms. His late son Beau served in the Army, and he has cited not being willing to send him to Afghanistan to fight in the war as\u00a0a key part of his decision-making<\/a>. And he\u2019s held a preference for military withdrawals from his time in the Senate during the Vietnam War, through the Iraq pullout when he was vice president, and on to today.<\/p>\n

He has shown a similar level of commitment to imposing new gun restrictions and bans throughout his career. As he has said repeatedly since he launched his campaign to become president, he was a primary backer of the 1994 \u201cassault weapons\u201d ban and has proposed myriad gun-control policies over the past several decades. It is a personal priority of his to the point where\u00a0his top self-professed wish<\/a>\u00a0is to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a relatively obscure law that provides the gun industry immunity from certain kinds of frivolous lawsuits that were popular in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Of course, despite becoming president, he is still limited in what he can actually accomplish because of congressional gridlock. But, while he can\u2019t get new gun legislation through, he can still pursue unilateral action. And, obviously, he\u2019s already done that.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s pushing two executive actions through the federal rulemaking process. One would redefine what constitutes a firearm in order to greatly expand the ATF\u2019s power. The other would effectively ban pistol-braced AR-15s, potentially criminalizing millions of American gun owners.<\/p>\n

But those actions have encountered significant, nearly unprecedented public resistance. While most proposed rule changes get a handful of public comments, President Biden\u2019s gun proposals have racked up hundreds of thousands. The pistol-brace ban has\u00a0more than 130,000<\/a>. The proposed redefinition of \u201cfirearm\u201d has\u00a0garnered over 240,000 almost entirely negative comments<\/a>\u00a0from the public.<\/p>\n

David Chipman, the gun-control activist nominated by the president to run the ATF, has also encountered firm headwinds from his fellow agents and Democratic senators alike.<\/p>\n

But, given the way President Biden has responded to the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan with a combination of silence and defiance, it\u2019s likely he\u2019ll do the same with the gun policies he can push through on his own. Perhaps that won\u2019t matter with Chipman\u2019s nomination since it still relies on approval from the Senate. But the likelihood that public backlash could prevent Biden\u2019s executive actions from going into effect appears diminished.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s increasingly looking like gun-rights advocates will have to fight the regulations in court rather than relying on the president to back away from them\u2014no matter the political costs he might face in doing so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Analysis: What Biden\u2019s Afghanistan Disaster Means for Gun Policy When it comes to gun policy, there are two big takeaways I see from the debacle of the past week in Afghanistan. The first is one that we really didn\u2019t need this disaster in order to learn. It\u2019s one that\u2019s been demonstrated countless times throughout human … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71124,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71123\/revisions\/71124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}