According to President Joe Biden (D), America has a huge problem with freedom to own and carry firearms. “We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer,” Biden said in a White House press statement.
How will he do that?
“Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” said Biden.
He doesn’t care that statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) show long-term drops in violent crime in America, or that the justifiable use of firearms to stop violent crimes is increasing.
Those fact just don’t fit into Biden’s ideology. Biden ignores the facts while he continues to call for a ban on “assault weapons,” otherwise known as semi-automatic firearms, such as the venerable AR-15.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) estimates there are over 20 million AR-15-style rifles now legally owned by Americans. These very common firearms fire a single shot with each pull of the trigger. They are not the “weapons of war,” as Biden calls them, carried by our military, which are capable of fully-automatic fire.
He also doesn’t care that criminals rarely use semi-automatic rifles—less than 3% of murderers use any type of rifle to commit their evil crimes. Actually, a person is more likely to be killed or harmed by someone with a knife, blunt object, or hands and feet than they are by someone with a rifle.
Yes, hands and feet!
In 2019, according to FBI crime data, rifles of all types accounted for 364 homicides. No doubt, each of these deaths was a tragedy, but if semi-automatic rifles are such a danger to society—so great they top Biden’s list of gun-control actions to take to—how do 364 incidents rate higher than the 1,476 that were committed with knives and other sharp objects in 2019?
Blunt objects (397) and hands and feet (600) were used to commit homicides more often than rifles.
And the FBI stats, it should be noted, include homicides committed from all makes and models of rifles. Lever-actions, bolt-actions, single shots, and, yes, semi-autos, are all put under the heading of “Rifles.” Meaning, even Biden’s scary “assault weapons” are a smaller subset of the larger category.
At the very least, Biden could be consistent and ask for federal legislation to ban these “assault knives.” And, clearly, according to his ideology, something needs to be done about “hands and feet,” as they contributed to another 600 homicides. Maybe he could work with Congress and introduce: “The Assault Feet Ban of 2021?”
If Biden truly feels there is an epidemic of violence in America, maybe he should focus his efforts on the people committing the violence—yes, the criminals. Working to ban semi-automatic rifles for law-abiding Americans will have little to no impact on what criminals decide to do with any weapons, including knives and hands and feet.
