Biden’s focus on semiautomatic weapons is ignorance manifest

Biden’s focus on semiautomatic weapons is ignorance manifest

By Kevin D. Williamson
December 10, 2022 2:30pm Updated

Pres. Biden recently declared that he wants to outlaw semiautomatic weapons in the US. His sentiments sounds good, but go completely against the reality of gun-ownership and crime statistics in America.

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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.

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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.

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Biden, like many Democrats, speaks about semiautomatic firearms — a category that includes nearly all of the handguns currently sold and the great majority of the rifles — as though the presence of such weapons in civilian hands were something new. Nothing could be further from the truth:

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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.


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