The hallmark of the Joe Biden presidency is ignorance, the hallmark of the gun-policy debate is ignorance, and so when President Biden weighs in on firearms — as with his recent insistence that the United States should categorically prohibit semiautomatic weapons — the result is ignorance squared.President Biden has been in public office as long as I have been alive, and he was elected to the Senate in 1972, when the violent-crime rate in the United States was on its way toward quadrupling from its relatively modest 1960 level to its ghastly peak in 1991. You would think that Biden would have at some point in those five decades learned a little something about guns and crime — but he has not.
The White House walked back Biden's all inclusive mention of semi-automatic firearms and said he was only talking about so-called "assault weapons". But as the Post op-ed pointed out:
According to ATF data, about 85% of all the handguns sold in the United States in 2018 were semiautomatics, with almost all of the rest being revolvers. ATF data do not separate semiautomatic rifles from other kinds of rifles, so the prevalence of semiautomatics cannot be documented precisely, but a look around any gun shop or a trip to any firing range will suggest that semiautomatics make up about the same share of rifles as of pistols.As a matter of crime control, semiautomatic rifles are very close to being a non-issue. In 2019, there were 13,927 murders in the United States, and rifles as a whole — not only semiautomatic, but all rifles combined — were used in only 364 of them. For comparison, 600 Americans died from being beaten to death with bare hands or stomped. There were more Americans murdered with baseball bats and other blunt objects than semiautomatic rifles.
We know Biden doesn't know what he is talking about, but he doesn't care. It's all about scoring with his base which includes the gun ban lobby.
Hat tip to Bearingarms.com.
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