Timothy Birdnow

Joe Biden's Gun Control is Class Warfare.

From the article:

Under the plan Biden teased on the campaign trail, "assault weapons” and "high-capacity magazines” would come under the National Firearms Act. The definition of "assault weapons” would extend to semi-automatic rifles, handguns, and some shotguns. High-capacity magazines are those that hold more than ten rounds—or most standard magazines.

Gun owners would have two choices: either surrender their property to the government or pay a $200 tax to keep each item, which will be added to a national registry. For many people, this would quickly turn into thousands of dollars paid to keep their own property. A hunter, for example, with just one AR-15 and four standard capacity magazines would owe the federal government $1,000. Failure to comply could mean up to ten years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine.

There are now more gun owners than ever. Even before record firearm sales in 2020, the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated one out of every five firearms purchased in this country is an AR-style rifle and that Americans own fifteen million AR-15s. Two-thirds of Americans own more than one gun; millions are middle- and low-income—people whose taxes Biden said he wouldn’t raise. "The president remains committed to his pledge from the campaign that nobody making under $400,000 a year will have their taxes increased,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on March 15. And yet, his gun control plan amounts to a massive tax on the working class.

Biden’s policies would make it prohibitively expensive for everyday Americans to own firearms, effectively pricing them out of self-defense and hunting tools. Wealthy Americans—and criminals—would be far less affected by their implementation. Democrats don’t seem to have a problem with that, as Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is also calling for legislation to renew the Assault Weapons Ban.

"We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” a definitive Department of Justice-funded study of the 1994 law concluded in 2004. "Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Lois Beckett, a reporter covering gun violence and gun policy at left-leaning ProPublica, points to a study by Duke University policy experts that came to a similar conclusion. "There is no compelling evidence that it saved lives,” they wrote. Indeed, this seems to be one of the rare issues that can bring people from across the political spectrum together.

"Regardless of one’s opinion on guns and gun control, it is obvious that this proposal will disproportionately impact poor and working-class communities,” wrote Kim Kelly in the Washington Post about Biden’s assault weapons ban. Kelly is a left-wing labor organizer; she likens the "war on guns” to our failed wars on "poverty” and "terror” that merely served to swell the size and scope of the federal government. On cue and without a hint of irony, Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin said Tuesday that the government could tackle gun violence the same way it successfully handled the opioid crisis.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, to paraphrase Mark Twain. Just as in the 1990s, the narrative about assault weapons is a largely media-driven fabrication. According to Gary Kleck, the David J. Bordua Professor Emeritus of Criminology at Florida State University, assault weapons were only used in 1.4 percent of gun crimes before the implementation of national or state assault weapons bans in the 1990s. The same is essentially true now. As Democrats call for another ban, FBI data show you are more likely to be killed by a club, a foot, or a knife, than an AR-15-style rifle.

[...]

It’s difficult to overstate the power of the media’s ability to manufacture consensus on issues like gun control. A recent study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that the "perpetuation of potentially inaccurate stereotypes not only misguides future research on [mass shootings], but also shapes the social construction of mass murder.” In other words, statistically rare acts of violence are propagandized as systemic social problems. How rare? "Put another way, being the victim of a mass shooting is just about as unlikely as being struck by lightning, which occurred at a rate of 0.035 per 100,000 people in 2016,” explains Jaclyn Schildkraut, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Oswego. You are far more likely to die in a car crash, in a fire, or choking on food, she notes.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:36 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 803 words, total size 9 kb.