U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- Things are not always as they seem. President Biden said guns are causing crime.
The President needs an excuse for the increase in crime while he has been in office. I have to wonder why guns didn’t cause crime before Joe Biden took office but are causing crime now, particularly in Democrat-controlled cities. This recent surge in violence isn’t a surprise to anyone but confirmed Democrats. The President needs to blame guns to distract us from his failed political decisions. Here is some perspective that the President hid from us.. or maybe he just forgot.
The obvious fact is that we let criminals out of jail during Covid. The inmates didn’t stop being criminals simply because we faced the Chinese flu and released them to the public. That political decision meant we had more dangerous criminals on the street who might commit crimes. We also refused to put criminals back in jail when they committed new crimes. That took away the deterrent effect of our justice system. Politicians made this problem, not a new kind of firearm.
Politicians created more violent crime because they put more criminals on the streets and because each criminal was committing more violent crimes than before. Biden also threw open our borders so drug gangs could move drugs almost at will. Even an elderly politician can understand why this causes more crime.
Of course, that isn’t what President Biden said. He said it is all about guns with strange serial numbers.
Biden didn’t mention that serial numbers were not even required on firearms until 1968. Many of our classic semi-automatic handguns had been in production for almost 6 decades by then, so there are tens of millions of unsterilized firearms in legal circulation. True, you can also get a government employee from the ATF to say anything the President wants him to say, but believing that a missing serial number causes crime plays us for a fool. The law enforcement sources I trust have not seen a surge of homemade and un-serialized firearms causing crime.
The President refused to say that the vast majority of our violent crime isn’t committed with a firearm. If we magically stopped all “gun crime” today then we’d still have the remaining 85 percent of violent crime to deal with tomorrow. Fewer than 1 in a hundred criminals used a long gun of any kind, a rifle or shotgun. Of course, Biden didn’t mention that. He probably forgot.
Most murders are committed by drug gangs fighting other drug gangs. Consider what that means since these gangs move MILLIONS of illegal immigrants across our border and move BILLIONS of dollars of drugs around the US each year. Those drug trafficking organizations have their own privately made submarines to move drugs. That says they can easily move a few ounces of steel, plastic, and lead anywhere they want them. Gun prohibition doesn’t work any better than drug prohibition.
We will not disarm violent drug gangs by regulating legal gun owners. It is dangerous to try and will cost more lives than it saves.
President Biden refused to mention that civilians use guns in armed defense. We know that ordinary civilians in the US use firearms defensively about 1.7 million times a year, or several thousand times every day. It is important to have a sense of perspective and proportion to understand what that means.
We defend ourselves with a firearm thousands of times a day, but there are about 10 thousand criminal murders with a firearm in the entire year. Honest citizens use a gun for justified self-defense about 170 times for each criminal murder. Guns in civilian hands are far more likely to save a life than to take one.
Think of it this way. If Biden’s new gun regulations disarm even a few honest gun owners, yet somehow disarm many criminals, then the new regulation will still cost innocent lives by disarming more innocent victims of crime. Unfortunately, the news is likely to be worse than that. Criminals don’t care about gun laws and background checks; you have to live in a fantasy world to believe they do. Maybe the president believes it, but we shouldn’t.
Criminals ignore our laws, so legal gun owners are the only ones affected by our 23 thousand firearms regulations. If all those existing gun laws didn’t stop violent crime, then what makes President Biden think criminals will obey his new gun laws?
About Rob Morse
The original article, with sources, is posted here. Rob Morse writes about gun rights at Ammoland, at Clash Daily, at Second Call Defense, and on his SlowFacts blog. He hosts the Self Defense Gun Stories Podcast and co-hosts the Polite Society Podcast. Rob was an NRA pistol instructor and combat handgun competitor.