Democrats Don’t Let The Constitution Get In The Way Of Stripping Americans’ Of Their Gun Rights

Via Shooting News Weekly by Dan Zimmerman

The Democrats' implication that loose gun control was responsible for the 2020 spike in homicides likewise is hard to take seriously. There was no change in gun policy that could account for that surge. Nor was there any change in gun policy that could account for the recent declines in homicide—a development that Democrats are quick to emphasize when Trump tries to blame the Biden administration for a supposedly “skyrocketing” murder rate. And their implicit thesis that more guns mean more violence is contradicted by crime trends since the early 1990s: From 1993 to 2013, when the homicide rate fell by more than half, the estimated number of guns owned by Americans rose by about the same percentage.

In contrast with Trump's record of doing (approximately) “nothing” to restrict guns, the Democrats brag about President Joe Biden's support for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) of 2022, “the first significant federal gun safety law in nearly 30 years.” The BSCA, they say, “includes the first-ever federal gun trafficking and straw purchasing law.” The platform does not mention that the BSCA defines “gun trafficking” broadly enough to encompass “prohibited persons” who obtain firearms, creating a new charge, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for people like Biden's own son, who was convicted in June of buying a revolver when he was a crack cocaine user.

Those prohibited persons include millions of Americans with no history of violence, whom Congress has arbitrarily deemed felons if they dare to exercise their Second Amendment rights. The categories include cannabis consumers and other illegal drug users, anyone who has ever been subjected to involuntary psychiatric treatment because he was deemed suicidal, and anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration, whether or not it involved violence of any sort.

Before the law that Democrats proudly cite, those people already faced up to three felony charges for buying firearms; the BSCA's “gun trafficking” provision added yet another. The same law also increased the maximum penalty for illegal gun possession from 10 years to 15 years. Biden evidently thought that people like his son were getting off too lightly.

In recent years, these sweeping bans on gun possession have provoked many constitutional challenges, some of which have been successful. But since Democrats do not even acknowledge the existence of the Second Amendment, they are happy to double down on this unjust and irrational policy. And they promise more of the same, saying they will “establish universal background checks” aimed at enforcing these restrictions.

Read in its entirety at shootingnewsweekly.com.

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