National Review
Biden’s ill-considered gun control gambit
Addressing the abominable news from Boulder, Colorado, on Monday, President Biden acknowledged that “he was still waiting for more information about the sniper.” And then, without stopping to breathe, he said, “I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour,” said Biden, “to take common sense measures that will save lives in the future and urge my colleagues in the House and the Senate. to act. ”With all due respect, Mr. President, you do. In front of the cameras, Biden asked the Senate to pass “universal background checks”. But Colorado, where those deaths occurred, already has this system – and, in addition, the sniper bought his gun at a store, not in particular, undergoing a background check in the process. Responding to Biden’s demand, Senator Marco Rubio was rightly confused. “I just don’t understand why everyone keeps focusing on that,” said Rubio. “That would not have prevented any of those shootings.” The president’s other ideas were also poorly considered. As he confirmed again, Biden hopes to ban the sale of certain cosmetically unpleasant rifles and magazines that are capable of containing more than ten cartridges. But, as one of the architects of the now expired 1994 “assault weapon ban”, he should have known better than that. So-called “assault weapons” aren’t just used so often in crimes that the FBI doesn’t even keep statistics – rifles of all kinds, remember, are used less often as murder weapons than hammers, fists or knives – but the evidence that banning them does anything important is lacking. When, in 2004, the “assault weapons” ban was about to be renewed, a report issued by the Department of Justice stated that “if renewed, the effects of the ban on armed violence are likely to be small, at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. ”Congress allowed it to lapse, and since then, the evidence has not become stronger. In their 2014 work, The Gun Debate: What everyone needs to know, Philip J. Cook of Stanford University and Kristin A. Goss concluded that “there is no convincing evidence that [the ban] saved lives ”, while in a research review that was updated in April 2020, RAND Corporation found evidence that“ assault weapons ”bans reduce homicides in general and mass shootings in particular to be“ inconclusive ” ”. The AR-15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the United States and, as such, is almost certainly protected by the Supreme Court’s “common use” standard. In Congress and in the courts, “inconclusive” will not work. “This is not a party issue,” said President Biden on Monday, “it is an American issue.” And, in fact, it is. And yet, Biden’s rhetoric suggests that he believes that this dispute is between a set of people who have all the right answers and a set that simply refuses to accept that they are wrong – a conviction that could not be further from the truth. Only one in four Americans believes that “tighter gun control” would “go a long way” in preventing armed violence, while more than half believe that universal background checks would make a “little difference” or “no difference”. Over time, gun control advocates, like Biden, simply ignored this fact, to the point that they are now unable to conceive of their critics as anything other than corrupt and bloodthirsty destroyers. Even now, with the National Rifle Association as weak as it has been in decades, arms controllers assume that Congress’ continued hesitation must be the result of something nefarious. It is not. Americans are simply not included on the agenda. And why would they be, given that this agenda is built on the pretext that there is an easy answer to a terrible and vexing problem – the damn constitution. Public research shows that even the most popular ideas about gun control tend to be disadvantaged when the debate shifts from the abstract to the private, and it is the private individuals that matter. There are no panaceas, just hard work. We must, of course, try to keep weapons out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them. We must, of course, do what we can to deal with mental illness. We must, of course, invest in policing. But we must not pursue symbolic victories at the expense of the Bill of Rights, banning America’s most popular rifle, ignoring the background check systems of 37 states and pretending that the Second Amendment does not exist.