Last week our friends in Gun-control Nation had an opportunity to meet with Joe in the White House and begin to plan a strategy to disarm America and take away all our beloved guns. At least that’s how this meeting will be described by the groups and noisemakers who represent Gun-nut Nation for whom any attempt to reduce the 125,000 intentional deaths and injuries suffered each year from gun violence are always described a nothing less than Armageddon-like terms.
The meeting was attended by the usual gun-control suspects – Brady, Moms, Giffords, Everytown – the last-named in case you didn’t know it being the organizational redoubt of none other than Michael Bloomberg, a.k.a., Mister Anti-Gun himself. In addition to the President, whose campaign narrative included a pretty strong argument in favor of gun control, there was also input from various advisers, including Susan Rice, who chairs a White House group, the Domestic Policy Council, which “drives the development and implementation of the President’s domestic policy agenda.”
In other words, if Joe decides to do something about guns, Susan Rice lines up all the Congressional support on the Hill and also makes sure that the advocacy community for that particular issue is kept informed. Which is why groups like Brady and Everytown were represented at the meeting last week. For all the fresh talk about ‘healing’ and bringing us together, I didn’t notice that Ms. Rice was particularly interested in getting input on the gun problem from the NRA.
Joe is an old hand at putting together advocacy groups that will try to develop new ways to regulate guns. He chaired a similar meeting after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook which produced a gun bill that went nowhere at all. But 2021 isn’t 2013. We now have a Democrat in the Oval Office and Democratic control of both houses on Capitol Hill. That being the case, what kind of gun-control initiatives can we expect when organizations like Brady and Everytown tell Susan Rice what she should do?
Back in December, the Brady Campaign published a list of ‘Six Gun Violence Prevention Policies for the 117th Congress.’ I assume this list was handed to Susan Rice last week. The priorities identified by Brady are as follows: (1). Comprehensive background checks; (2). national red-flag law to keep guns out of the hands of highest-risk individuals; (3). disarm domestic abusers; (4). reduce police violence; (5). prioritize solutions to deal with gun violence in inner-city neighborhoods; and (6). stricter regulation of gun dealers and manufacturers who are currently shielded from class-action torts and other laws which protect consumers from unsafe products.
If this list were to become the basis for a Biden plan to reduce gun violence, to quote Grandpa, “oy zuch en vai,” which is what Grandpa said whenever anyone told him something that he knew was either totally crazy, totally ridiculous, or both.
This may come as a surprise to some members of Gun-control Nation, but somewhere around 85% of all intentional gun injuries, fatal and non-fatal - homicides, suicides, and assaults -happen to be crimes. How do you put together a program to reduce any kind of crime without even mentioning the penal system which, after all, just happens to be the way we deal with crime?
Here’s a remarkable quote from what the Brady Campaign believes should be Joe’s approach to dealing with gun crime: “focus on upstream issues, like empowering the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to shut down gun trafficking into our cities.” Know what that means? Try this: nothing. That’s what it means.
I consider myself a bone-fide member of Gun-control Nation, having first started thinking about gun violence when I worked in Uncle Ben’s gun factory back in 1964. And over the nearly 60 years that I have been either a manufacturer, importer, wholesaler, or retailer of guns, I never made or sold a gun because I wanted it to be used in an illegal or dangerous way.
Why is Gun-control Nation so afraid to talk about crime when they talk about guns?
