Like a windup doll, President Biden took off after “assault weapons” following two recent mass shootings. Early on Thanksgiving Day he told reporters, “the idea … we still allow semi-automatic 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.”
He thinks he might be able to get something passed during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress — that lull in the storm between the midterm elections and the installation of a new Congress in January: “I’m going to do it whenever I — I got to make that assessment as I get in and start counting the votes.”
The votes aren’t there, Joe. For a sweeping gun-control bill banning the purchase, possession, or sale of semi-automatic firearms to pass the Senate, it must first pass a nearly insurmountable barrier: the filibuster.
As the liberal Brennan Center for Justice explains:
Once a bill gets to a vote on the Senate floor, it requires a simple majority of 51 votes to pass after debate has ended.
But there’s a catch: before it can get to a vote, it actually takes 60 votes to cut off debate, which is why a 60-vote supermajority is now considered the de facto minimum for passing legislation in the Senate.
But there’s the “silent” filibuster rule that may end any chance of Biden getting anything passed:
But since the early 1970s, senators have been able to use a “silent” filibuster. Anytime a group of 41 or more senators simply threatens a filibuster, the Senate majority leader can refuse to call a vote.
Dead. Done. Gone.
So ol’ Joe can count votes until the end of time and there’s little chance anything the Democrats can dream up to infringe further on citizens’ Second Amendment rights will see the light of day between now and January.
But that doesn’t mean ol’ Joe won’t keep trying. Somehow he thinks that with sufficient repetition of the lie that the problem is guns, not the people using them, voters will support a ban on them.
In August, following the Uvalde, Texas, shooting at Robb Elementary School (where, it will be remembered, law enforcement delayed responding to the threat for 74 minutes!), Biden repeated the canard: “A 20-year-old kid can walk in and buy [a firearm]? … What’s the matter with us?” He added, “I’m determined to ban assault weapons in this country. Determined. I did it once, and I’ll do it again.”
Of course, he is referring to the Clinton gun ban of 1994 that ended after 10 years of evidence showing that it did nothing to reduce gun violence.
According to Biden, it’s the firearms themselves that somehow are the cause of the shootings. In August he repeated the fable: “We’re living in a country awash with weapons of war. Weapons that weren’t designed to hunt, they’re designed to take on an enemy.… What’s the rationale for these weapons outside of a war zone?”
He added:
We have to act for all those kids gunned down on our streets every single day that never make the news…. You have to act so our kids can learn to read in school, instead of learning to duck and cover.
Journalists unpacking the lies spouted by ol’ Joe in just this statement alone could make a nice living doing so.
In his statement following the recent shooting in Colorado Springs, Biden touted his support for a law that further infringes on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, the real target (sorry) of the legislation:
Earlier this year, I signed the most significant gun safety law in nearly three decades, in addition to taking other historic actions. But we must do more. We need to enact an assault weapons ban to get weapons of war off America’s streets.
Biden is referring to what the mainstream media called the “most important piece of gun legislation since 1994,” which includes the odious and unconstitutional federal funding for red flag laws to states wanting to pass them.
All those red flag laws have managed to do, according to the Associated Press, is “remove the firearms from people 15,049 times since 2020,” but with no evidence of any measurable related decrease in gun violence.
Naturally, rights are in danger any time Congress is in session, but even more so during the lame-duck session, as enough Republicans In Name Only could climb on board a complete firearms ban to end the filibuster, providing a path to the legislation’s passage, while escaping punishment from voters.
