President Joe Biden told Americans on Monday that regulating firearms is the best way to combat rising violent crime in U.S. cities, but taking away the gun rights of law-abiding Americans doesn’t rein in criminals, especially those let off the hook by soft-on crime progressives.
Violent crime, often perpetrated using firearms, is on the rise in many American cities. In 2021 alone, at least 14 Democrat-controlled urban hubs reported all-time high homicide records.
Even though this historic crime streak is even plaguing cities with strict gun laws, the Biden administration wants gun parts, such as frames and receivers, to be serialized and regulated as regular firearms so they can be traced. This would require customers who purchase gun kits from retailers to undergo a background check like they would if they were buying an already-assembled firearm.
“All of a sudden, it’s no longer a ghost. It has a return address. It’s going to help save lives, reduce crime, and get more criminals off the streets,” Biden said.
What Biden failed to mention in his lie-riddled gun-control speech is that build-your-own guns make up a remarkably small portion of the firearms used to commit crimes in America. To put it in perspective, New York City police seized more than 6,000 illegal guns in 2021. Only about 200 of them did not have serial numbers.
New polling suggests that 61 percent of voters are not pleased with Biden’s handling of crime, so now the White House is clearly trying to take action to combat this negative perception with random rules ostensibly to curb gun violence. Chances are, however, any rules regulating so-called “ghost guns” won’t have the effect on crime that Biden claims they would.
Media outlets often frame the increase in guns without serial numbers as a big problem for crime-plagued cities, but the fact is that a large percentage of these criminals obtained their guns illegally.
A 2019 Department of Justice survey of imprisoned criminals found that at least 43 percent of offenders obtained their firearms via the black market. Only 10 percent made a purchase from a federally licensed firearms store, which is where Biden’s new rules would be enforced. In other words, Biden’s new gun rules won’t change the crime rates because his policies target purchasers who buy from gun retailers, not the black market.
Instead of trampling on the Second Amendment to supposedly combat rising crime, Biden should encourage members of his party and progressive judicial activists to toughen up on the offenders who use guns to facilitate illicit activity.
Earlier this year, California’s soft-on-crime Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation released from prison Smiley Allen Martin, one of the gunmen accused of going on a shooting spree in downtown Sacramento last week. Martin was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018 for domestic violence and assault. If not for his early release under the state’s prison capacity reduction plan, Martin would still be locked up.
Prosecuting and locking up offenders is pivotal in combatting crime, but it’s not something Biden or Democrats are focused on promoting.
In fact, for most of the last month, the White House has actively defended progressive criminal reform policies and people such as Biden’s Supreme Court pick Ketanji Brown Jackson who are guilty of using them to let dangerous offenders off the hook.
Taking away the gun rights of law-abiding Americans doesn’t stop dangerous criminals from obtaining firearms and committing crimes. Instead of trying to legislate crime off the streets, Biden and Democrats should focus on prosecuting and punishing offenders to the full extent of the law.
