With everyone from newspapers and commentators to campaign surrogates and the candidates themselves vying for our attention, it’s impossible to keep track of every political issue during a presidential election year.
That’s why I tend to focus on one of the most fundamental issues affecting the lives of Americans: our Second Amendment rights. Perhaps the rapid approach of deer season will serve to bring it back to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, if this summer’s unprecedented violence and civil unrest didn’t do that already.
Have you tried to buy any ammo online this year? How about gun parts? Did you have a firearm shipped to your local gun shop from an online retailer? Are you planning to this season? Have you ever bought a gun from a private seller at a gun show? Did you ever make a firearm receiver from a blank?
Under a Biden-Harris administration, that will all be illegal. They’ve promised to ban things they clearly don’t even understand, such as “magazines that can hold multiple bullets,” in addition to eventually banning all guns except for non-existent “smart” guns — a 1990s liberal fantasy revived for our time.
In four decades in the U.S. Senate and through three attempts to become president of the United States, Joe Biden has made no secret of his desire to take most modern firearms from Americans. It was his bill in 1994 that enacted the first idiotic “assault weapons ban,” which did absolutely nothing to reduce violent crime, but made ordinary citizens into criminals for putting an adjustable stock on a varminting rifle. And this time around, Biden is just as committed to taking our guns, even promising to put Beto “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47” O’Rourke in charge of it.
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Asked point blank about coming for people’s guns, Biden’s response was, “Bingo! You’re right if you have an assault weapon.” For the record, under even the most restrictive definition, “people who have an assault weapon” are a plurality of American gun owners. Under a more expansive definition, the vast majority of American gun owners should expect a visit from O’Rourke’s enforcers under a Biden administration.
Gun rights are doubly important in this election because they’re intertwined with many of the other major issues at stake. Joe Biden, for example, still refuses to say whether he would expand the U.S. Supreme Court and fulfill the long-held left-wing dream of overwhelming the originalist majority with new justices who would recreate an activist, “living constitution” court like the one that existed in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.
For all the noise they make about abortion and Roe v. Wade, the “conservative” Supreme Court majority actually hasn’t done much — anything really — to upset the status quo on that issue. The last time the court issued a far-reaching abortion decision was almost 30 years ago — and that case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, left Roe essentially intact.
So what is it that actually has Biden and the left fired up enough to pack the court?
I think the court’s unwillingness to neuter the Second Amendment and invalidate “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” Of the stiff rebukes this Court has delivered to the left, 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller and 2010’s McDonald v. Chicago are among the most biting. Together, they unequivocally affirmed the inalienable right of American citizens to own and carry modern firearms.
In Biden, gun-grabbers see their path to consigning the Second Amendment to a historical footnote and finally achieving their goal of creating an America where only the government and criminals have the power to defend themselves.
Jason D. Meister is a political strategist and an advisory board member of Donald J. Trump for President Inc. Mr. Meister regularly appears on Fox News, Fox Business, BBC, WSJ Live, One America News, and other media channels.
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