{"id":91065,"date":"2023-03-22T13:13:13","date_gmt":"2023-03-22T18:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=91065"},"modified":"2023-03-22T13:13:13","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T18:13:13","slug":"91065","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=91065","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Biden Wants To Emulate California\u2019s (Failed) Gun Laws<\/a><\/p>\n

By John R. Lott Jr. for RealClearPolitics<\/em><\/p>\n

President Biden traveled to Monterey Park, California, the site of a mass public shooting that left 11 dead in January, to announce new executive actions on gun control. He touts the proposals as necessary \u201cto reduce gun violence and make our communities safer<\/a>.\u201d But California already has all the gun control laws that Biden put forward, and yet it has\u00a0a higher per capita rate of mass public shootings than the rest of the country<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Measures already in place include background checks on all transfers of firearms, \u201cred flag\u201d gun confiscation laws, and an assault weapon ban. Even if Biden\u2019s ideal background check law had been in effect and perfectly enforced,\u00a0it wouldn\u2019t have stopped one mass public shooting this century<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Biden exaggerated the support for his background check proposals. The surveys he cites\u00a0compress long, complicated proposals\u00a0<\/a>in<\/a>to one-sentence summaries<\/a>. But when people are told that these laws would turn someone into a felon just for temporarily lending a handgun to a woman who is being threatened by a stalker, survey respondents answer that they\u00a0oppose\u00a0the regulation.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

One proposal would force people who sell or transfer only a few guns to obtain a federal firearms license. But even licensed dealers face an uphill regulatory battle. Biden\u2019s zero-tolerance (zero tolerance for what?) policy drives licensed dealers out of business. The end effect is to stop gun sales.<\/p>\n

But Biden has another goal. Despite federal law explicitly forbidding a national gun registry, the President has begun putting together a national database on gun ownership.\u00a0By the beginning of last year, there were\u00a0almost a billion entries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Forcing gun transfers to go through licensed dealers will help create a more complete registry. And that\u2019s about all it will do, since gun licensing and registration doesn\u2019t solve any crime<\/a>.\u00a0The bottom line is to\u00a0drive up the price of guns for law-abiding citizens<\/a>\u00a0and therefore stop gun sales altogether. In other countries, and even in parts of the United States, registration is consistently used to eventually take away people\u2019s guns, and given\u00a0Biden\u2019s constant call to ban all semi-automatic weapons<\/a>, which make up about 85% of all guns sold in the U.S., that is a real concern here.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Biden wants to \u201cimprove public awareness and increase<\/a>\u201d use of red flag laws (Extreme Risk Protection Orders). But this diverts focus from better laws already on the books in all 50 states. Involuntary commitment laws provide for evaluations by mental health experts, an emergency court hearing, and a lawyer. These laws give judges more options, such as mandatory outpatient mental health care, driver\u2019s license suspensions, or taking away their guns.<\/p>\n

By contrast, red flag laws only take away a person\u2019s guns. If a person is truly suicidal \u2013 almost all the red flag cases involve concerns over suicide \u2013 there are so many other methods that are just as likely to be successful (hanging oneself, walking in front of a train, jumping from a height<\/a>). Simply taking away someone\u2019s legally owned guns isn\u2019t a serious solution.<\/p>\n

Gun control advocates claim that California\u2019s 1990 assault weapon ban is responsible for\u00a0its 55% drop in firearm mortality from 1993 to 2017<\/a>. But California\u2019s murder rate\u00a0peaked in 1993 at 13.1 per 100,000 people<\/a>, rising from 10.9 in 1989, the year before the state enacted its assault weapons ban. So why did the murder rate\u00a0fall by 10%\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0in 1994 and not in 1990, and continue falling by 53% by 2000? California\u2019s tough three-strikes criminal punishment law started on\u00a0March 7, 1994<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Biden says we need national gun control laws to protect states like California, but that ignores the fact that the guns used in California\u2019s mass public shootings were from California. Indeed, the firearms in all but two mass public shootings over the last 25 years<\/a>\u00a0were from the state where the attack occurred.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Gun control measures aren\u2019t just ineffective against mass public shootings \u2013 they actually encourage attacks. The shootings keep occurring in places where people can\u2019t have concealed handguns. In Los Angeles County, where two mass public shootings occurred in January, there is\u00a0only one permit for every 5,660 adults<\/a>. In San Mateo County, where another attack occurred, there is one permit per 24,630 adults. By comparison, there is one permit holder for every nine people in the 43 right-to-carry states.<\/p>\n

Concealed handgun permit holders make a difference in those 43 states. Indeed,\u00a0people legally carrying guns stopped at least 37 mass public shootings since 2020<\/a>. And when Americans are allowed to legally carry concealed handguns, they\u00a0stop about half<\/a>\u00a0of<\/a>\u00a0the active shooting attacks in the U.S<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Mass public shooters purposefully pick targets where they know their victims cannot protect themselves. The perpetrator of a mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., last year wrote in his manifesto:\u00a0\u201cAreas where CCW<\/a>\u00a0[carrying a concealed weapon]<\/a>\u00a0are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack<\/a>\u00a0.<\/a>..\u00a0<\/u>Areas with strict gun laws are also great places of attack<\/a>.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Other mass murderers have made similar statements.<\/p>\n

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These killers may be crazy, but most aren\u2019t stupid. Yet, states like California, New York, and New Jersey are moving to create more gun-free zones<\/a>, where mass murderers won\u2019t have to worry about victims protecting themselves.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Unfortunately, the gun control Biden pushes won\u2019t stop mass public shootings and will only make problems worse. Gun control failures are used to call for more gun control laws. The solutions that would actually work aren\u2019t being discussed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biden Wants To Emulate California\u2019s (Failed) Gun Laws By John R. Lott Jr. for RealClearPolitics President Biden traveled to Monterey Park, California, the site of a mass public shooting that left 11 dead in January, to announce new executive actions on gun control. He touts the proposals as necessary \u201cto reduce gun violence and make … 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":[50,5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goobermint","category-politics","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91065","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=91065"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91066,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91065\/revisions\/91066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}