If truth is still the basis of a sound defense, then a letter from 16 state attorneys general to President Joe Biden (D) should—if it gets deserved media attention—help to dispel Biden’s anti-Second Amendment ambitions.
The letter is a reaction to Biden’s comments on our Second Amendment rights in his State of the Union address.
“We write to address your irresponsible and unconstitutional demand that Congress ban firearms commonly used by law-abiding Americans for self-defense. With every tool at our disposal, we will oppose your attempt to trample on Americans’ fundamental right to defend themselves with guns,” begins the letter from Austin Knudsen, attorney general of Montana, which is also signed by 15 other attorneys general.
The letter stays pointed.
“Anti-gun politicians like yourself use the misleading label of ‘assault weapon’ to scare Americans—expecting us to endorse your efforts to criminalize law-abiding gun owners. We also know that your personal definition of ‘assault weapons’ is staggeringly broad—encompassing all semiautomatic weapons—which are the most common and effective self-defense weapons in use today, employed by over 100 million Americans to defend their homes and families. Last November, in a moment of unscripted candor, you stated to reporters that ‘[t]he idea we still allow semiautomatic weapons to be purchased is sick. It’s just sick. It has no, no social redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single, solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.’”
Later, the letter notes an example Biden used as an excuse to diminish Americans’ constitutional rights to show that even this specifically chosen example does not support the president’s positions.
“Knowing how radical your proposed policy is, you attempted to assuage Americans’ legitimate concerns about self-defense by invoking the example of Brandon Tsay, a heroic young man who wrestled a firearm away from an active shooter in Monterey Park, California. Your reliance on Mr. Tsay’s heroics, however, is both cynical and self-defeating. His example directly undermines your case, in at least two ways.
“First, Mr. Tsay had the great misfortune of facing an active shooter while unarmed himself. That’s not a fair fight. Most Americans would understandably prefer a firearm of their own when facing an active shooter—which you would deny them. While Mr. Tsay’s actions were heroic, the events of that day were also uncommon. Unarmed bystanders almost always fall victim to homicidal shooters and, absent unique circumstances, Mr. Tsay would likely have been no different. Far from empowering heroes like Mr. Tsay, your policies would disarm them, turning everyday heroes into additional victims of deranged killers.”
The simple logic of this analysis is perhaps more than most mainstream-media reporters would care to follow, but, if directly asked, would any sane person say they wouldn’t want a good armed citizen to be there to shoot back at a sociopath?
“Statistics also show that a crime victim who uses a gun in self-defense is much safer than an unarmed crime victim (like Mr. Tsay) who resists by other means,” says the letter. “Again, your own CDC report demonstrates this conclusion: ‘Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.’ In other words, having a gun to defend yourself against an armed criminal is the safest form of self-defense. In your speech, you correctly praised Brandon Tsay for having ‘found the courage to act and wrestle the semiautomatic pistol away from the gunman,’ but then you immediately called for policies that will disarm law-abiding citizens—making it harder, and much more dangerous, for them to engage in lawful self-defense in the future.
“Second, your reliance on Mr. Tsay’s case suffers from another glaring problem. You invoked the Monterey Park shooting to demand a ban on ‘assault weapons.’ But the home-modified Cobray pistol used by the Monterey shooter was already illegal under California’s ‘assault weapon’ ban—and thus an ‘assault weapon ban was obviously ineffective in preventing the shooting.”
The letter then concludes that the “right to keep and bear arms in self-defense guards and protects the right to life, the first and most fundamental God-given right recognized in the Declaration of Independence. The right to keep and bear arms exists for the purpose of allowing citizens to resist tyranny—both the petty tyranny of an armed criminal and the systematic tyranny of oppressive government. Our Nation has a proud history of protecting and defending this fundamental right, and the times when we have failed to do so represent some of the darkest hours of our collective history.”
