It has been almost a full year since the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was signed into law. What better time for President Joe Biden, Democrat lawmakers, and gun control activists of all stripes to come together to both celebrate that accomplishment and plan for the next? The eclectic group converged on Connecticut’s University of Hartford for Friday’s National Safer Communities Summit and were regaled with promises and pratfalls alike by the president.
Progress, Plans, and Promises
“Hello, hello, hello,” President Biden said as he meandered up to the stage, clearly in a jovial mood. “I think maybe your patience exceeds your good judgement.” While the commander-in-chief was making one of his usual self-effacing jokes about his age – he ranges, in this speech, from just a little shy of 103 to 110 – his words were, perhaps, prescient given the presentation to come.
Biden transitioned more or less smoothly from his opening joke to identifying with those who survived gun violence or lost loved ones, but he quickly moved on to his alleged involvement in the civil rights movement before touting the success of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
The bill may have fallen short of achieving the big gun control goals, but it still represented at least some progress toward those ends. While no national red-flag law was established, it created a $750 million grant program to bribe states to institute their own. It failed to require universal background checks, but it did expand the check performed by licensed dealers to include mental health and juvenile records for any would-be buyer aged 18-20.
The president boasted that more than $230 million had been given out to states to institute red-flag laws. He cheered the 21 states that have done so and the ten that have banned so-called assault weapons. Beyond lauding the progress and the plans and promising to do his part, Biden also managed to bungle the facts on multiple occasions.
Gun Control Gaffes
What’s a Biden speech on gun control without a few good gun gaffes and false facts? At one point, the president insisted that gun trafficking had not been a federal crime until the 2022 law. Simply put, that’s false. Straw purchases – which occur when someone who can pass a background check buys a firearm for someone else – have for years been punishable by up to ten years in prison and a $25,000 fine. And while gifting a gun is a valid purchase – so long as the recipient isn’t a prohibited person – lying on the ATF form 4473 about such a purchase is, by itself, a crime punishable by fines and up to five years in prison, even if the transaction is denied.
The 2022 act does increase the maximum possible sentence for straw purchases to 25 years, but it certainly didn’t make a previously legal activity a crime – not in this particular instance, anyway. It also directs the ATF to pay special attention to firearms trafficking, both on the small scale – like individual straw buys – and the large scale – like international trafficking – but that has long been the agency’s mission.
Biden spoke of how “more people die from gun violence as a consequence of suicide than anything else that happens in the nation.” Unfortunately for the president, the CDC disagrees, as heart disease and cancer are – and have long been – top of the list, with neither firearms deaths nor general suicides ranking in the top ten causes of mortality.
He claimed there are mass shootings every day. There aren’t, not even by the Gun Violence Archive’s very loose definition. He called AR-15s weapons of war and “the single biggest driver of profits for the gun industry.” Liberty Nation has “weapon of war” well defined, and the latest ATF reports show that there are almost twice as many handguns produced and sold in America than rifles of any kind – never mind the so-called assault rifles which seem so scary to Democrats.
There were several other mistruths – like the old lie that the gun industry is immune from liability or that mass shootings were down for the ten-year assault weapons ban of 1994 – but nothing quite matched his nonsensical statement on pistol braces:
“Put a pistol on a brace and it turns it into a gun. It makes it where you have a higher caliber weapon – bullet coming out of the gun. It is essentially turning it into a short barreled rifle, which as [sic] been a weapon of choice for a number of mass shooters.”
There’s Never Enough – And There Never Will Be
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
It’s not enough, of course, to celebrate the win they negotiated last year. It’s never enough, and they knew it wouldn’t be when they agreed to it. But while Republicans seem to have viewed the bill as a compromise that holds the line overall, Democrats saw it all along for what it really was: one more step in the march toward a disarmed citizenry.
“This is not a cure-all for the ways gun violence affects our nation, but it is a long-overdue step in the right direction,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said just before his chamber passed the act in 2022. President Biden expressed the same sentiment at the summit on Friday. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was, he said, the most significant gun control in 30 years – but more to the point, it’s an “important first step.”
He called on Congress to act. Failing that, he called on the voters to replace Congress. He touted his own unprecedented level of executive action on gun control and promised to never give up, never quit fighting, assuring those listening that they would achieve their goals. “We will ban assault weapons in this country. We will ban multi-round magazines. We will hold gun manufactures liable. We will beat the gun industry. We will beat big money that sits behind them and the politicians who refuse to stand up and act,” the president declared.
Listen well to what that man and his ilk say: Gaffes and misinformation aside, they’re telling us precisely what they want – and they won’t stop pushing until they get it.
