The Kamala Harris ‘Gun Violence’ Sham
Democrats don't want crime to decrease, they want it to increase.
It’s hard to say which is more insane, dishonest, and deserving of contempt and ridicule. On the one hand, you have Democrats pretending there are countless genders, men can be mothers, and things of that sort.
On the other hand, you have nominal president Joe Biden announcing that nominal vice-president Kamala Harris will take the lead on “gun violence” during their 2024 re-“election” campaign, as if their goal is to reduce violent crime.
The two main elements of their gun plan are laws to prohibit the manufacture and acquisition of rifles and ammunition magazines most useful for the entire range of defensive purposes, and to move the gun-purchase background check system toward becoming a firearm registry that can be used to enforce gun confiscation down the road.
The whole thing is absurd for a bunch of reasons.
First, if Democrats wanted to reduce violent crime, Democrat city councils wouldn’t defund police departments, Democrat governors would have sent in their states’ National Guard infantry and military police units to quell the riots in 2020, and Democrat prosecutors wouldn’t refuse to prosecute people arrested for violent crimes. And Biden’s handlers wouldn’t order him to allow waves of gang members and other illegals to cross our border.
Second, Democrats want crimes involving guns to increase because it gives them an issue with which to rally their radical-left voter base. For the record, midway through the Obama administration, “progressives” elevated “guns” to their list of primary issues with which to energize their hardest-core voters.
Third, Democrats want violent and property crimes (looting, arson, etc.) to increase, to destabilize society. As explained by Soviet KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in the 1980s, “destabilization” is the second of four phases in the communist strategy to take control of a country.
Fourth, about one-third of murders and three-fourths of other violent crimes are committed without guns, and Democrats are silent about them.
Fifth, greater gun ownership has coincided with less crime over the last 30 years. Specifically, the nation’s murder rate hit an all-time high in 1980 and its total violent crime rate—which includes murder (and non-negligent manslaughter), rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—hit an all-time high in 1991.
Thereafter, Americans’ gun purchases—particularly handguns and AR-15s—the two types of guns that Democrats have most tried to get banned over the last 50 years—began soaring. By 2014, the murder and total violent crime rates had been cut in half and had fallen to all-time lows. The increase in violent crime since the end of 2019 is due entirely to the Democrat policies mentioned above. Any Democrat pretense to the contrary (as with claims about men having babies and the like) should be shouted down without further discussion. To argue with Democrats about such nonsense only empowers them.
Using statistics as a diversion
In a speech launching her new crusade, Harris said “The number one cause of death for the children of America is gun violence.”
Ultimately, the way to deal with that is as the Supreme Court dealt with anti-Second Amendment (now retired) Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). Justice Breyer had rattled off a variety of statistics about the numbers of crime victims around the country, as if to justify the District’s handgun ban, which Heller overturned. His idea was that whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees, it should be balanced against the District government’s interest in reducing crime by banning guns.
The majority in Heller disagreed. It said “We know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding ‘interest-balancing’ approach. The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges’ assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad.”
But while Harris’ statistical claim relative to children is irrelevant in constitutional terms, we can consider it for what else it may reveal.
Children are people under the age of 18. There are more than 930,000 abortions and about 34,000 other deaths among persons under age 18 each year. About 2,500 of the 34,000 involve firearms, and about the same number are due to motor vehicle accidents. Of the roughly 2,500 involving firearms, about 800 are suicides. More children commit suicide without using firearms, but Democrats don’t care about those.
Aside from the wicked hypocrisy of pretending to care about 2,500 gun-related deaths while encouraging 930,000 abortions, and about suicides with guns while ignoring those that don’t involve guns, it’s important to remember two things about the Democrats’ tactic of ranking guns as the “number 1” cause of death among children.
First, when motor vehicle accident deaths outnumber those involving guns, Democrats never say guns are “number 2,” because that wouldn’t do for political purposes. They instead get guns to be “number 1” by counting “children” as anyone under the age of 20 or 24, which jacks up the gun number by counting deaths due to shootouts and drive-bys among drug-dealing gang bangers.
Second, guns are always involved in a small percentage of deaths among children or any other age group. For example, 2,500 is just over seven percent of 34,000. But the only deaths Democrats care about are those they can use for political purposes.
‘Weapons of war . . . on the streets’
Parroting the most boring of all anti-gun soundbites, Harris also said “Weapons of war have no place on the streets of a civil society.”
As we might say if Harris were a comedian, she should “get some new material.” Forty years ago, the handgun-ban activist group Handgun Control, Inc., said “HANDGUNS flood the houses and streets of our nation” and “People are dying daily in our streets as if they were on some foreign battlefield.” (Emphasis in the original.) If the “streets” and “foreign battlefield” rhetoric sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same rhetoric Democrats use nowadays to campaign against AR-15s and other rifles they call “assault weapons.”
Point of fact, all offensive weapons are potentially “weapons of war,” rifles are generally offensive weapons (whereas handguns are generally defensive weapons), and offensive weapons shouldn’t be “on the streets” when society is civil, other than for ceremonial purposes during holiday parades and the like.
But Biden and Harris aren’t trying to impose a law to prohibit people from carrying rifles “on the streets,” they’re trying to impose a law to prohibit rifles that are most commonly acquired and used today (AR-15s and the like) from being manufactured, to prevent people from having them at all. Americans have more than 20 million AR-15s, which spend most of their time locked away at home or at a rifle range, not “on the streets.” Therefore, if Democrats were honest about what they’re trying to achieve, their soundbite would be “rifles have no place in civil society.”
Of course, the problem with that would be that the Second Amendment protects the right to “weapons of offense and armor of defense” (as explained in Heller) for precisely the reason that society might one day not be civil.
Furthermore, in U.S. v. Miller (1939), the Court endorsed the individual right to keep and bear arms that have a “relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” such as those that are “part of the ordinary military equipment” and others the use of which “could contribute to the common defense.”
For that proposition, the Court cited the decision of the Tennessee Supreme Court in Aymette v. State (1840), that the right to arms includes those “such as are usually employed in civilized warfare, and that constitute the ordinary military equipment. If the citizens have these arms in their hands, they are prepared in the best possible manner to repel any encroachments upon their rights by those in authority.”
Maybe one day a reporter will ask Biden and Harris why their campaign for an AR-15 ban is entirely at odds with these decisions, along with the statements of everyone who had a role in promoting and drafting what became the Second Amendment.