The Deceit of 'Gun-Control' Bills

By Charles C. W. Cooke. July 5, 2023

Small children tend to believe that, if they cover their own eyes, they will be able to prevent other people from seeing them. In recent years, a similar conviction has been displayed by the opponents of the right to keep and bear arms, who have apparently managed to convince themselves that if they ignore the failure of all the gun-control measures that they have imposed in the past, everyone else will forget about them, too.

They're wrong.

In April, President Joe Biden (D) climbed atop his high horse and asked a room full of journalists, "How many more Americans must die before Republicans in Congress will act to protect our communities?" This was dishonest to its core. It is true that most Republicans in Congress—and many Democrats, too—have declined to endorse all of Biden's anti-Second Amendment extremism. But this is not because those lawmakers are uninterested in protecting our communities; it is because those lawmakers understand that nothing that Biden has proposed would serve that end. Biden's insinuation—that everyone in America secretly knows that he is right, but that only some of them are willing to act on it—is false, morally grotesque and unbecoming of a president of the United States.

It is also extremely self-serving, for Biden seems to already have forgotten—or, rather, he is already pretending to have forgotten—that the federal government passed a whole bunch of counterproductive gun-control measures as recently as last year. In August of 2022, Congress approved a bill called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which Biden praised to the hilt. .....