Don’t expect Joe Biden to talk about gun control in the first presidential debate. Or the second or third for that matter. Don’t expect him to answer direct questions about it. He’ll ignore the moderators and ignore reporter questions, if they actually ever ask him a real question.
Here’s what you should expect. Biden will shuffle, side-step, tap dance, drag out, duck, dodge, tiptoe and shake off every attempt to get him to explain his far-left driven plan to rob Americans of their gun rights. How do I know? He’s done it before.
Biden became incensed when he was actually asked a question about his gun control plans. He flew into a tirade when union worker Jerry Wayne said to the candidate, “You are actively trying to end our Second Amendment right and take away our guns.”
Cursing Challengers
Biden didn’t like that, and he let Wayne know.
“You're full of s***,” Biden said, ignoring the campaign aide desperately trying to get him away. “I did not -- no, no, shush, shush. I support the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment -- just like right now if you yelled ‘fire,’ that’s not free speech. And from the very beginning: I have a shotgun, I have a 20-gauge, a 12-gauge. My sons hunt, guess what? You’re not allowed to own any weapon. I’m not taking your gun away at all. You need 100 rounds?” For all his outward affableness, Joe has a temper.
Never mind no one has ever seen this shotgun. It must be the same one he told his wife Jill to blindly, and illegally, fire into the night sky if she was startled. Biden then heard something rarely heard on his campaign. Wayne challenged his talking points-fed answer.
“You and Beto (O’Rourke) say you’re going to take our guns,” Wayne told Biden.
That’s when Biden really went off the rails.
“I did not say that,” Biden said, growing agitated. “That's not true. I did not say that.”
Wayne reminded Biden that as a public servant, he’s responsible to the voters and the taxpayers who have been funding his salary for nearly a half century.
“You’re working for me, man,” Wayne said.
That was too much for Biden. “I’m not working for - gimme a break, man. Don’t be such a horse’s ass.”
Biden had a fair point. He wasn’t working for Wayne. He’s working for the Bloomberg, the gun control lobby and the far-left wing of the Democrat party pushing his campaign platform to get him into office so they can really run the show.
Biden tried to placate the crowd gathered around him by saying it wasn’t every gun he wanted to confiscate, just certain ones he finds scary.
“We’re going to take your AR-14s,” Biden said. Whew! That was close. For a second there, people thought he actually knew what he was talking about. Good thing he’s not talking about AR-15s. He’d have a heck of a time snatching up all 18 million-plus modern sporting rifles that are in circulation today.
Don’t Speak
Biden’s handlers quickly shuffled him back to the basement and told the adoring press gaggled outside he wouldn’t be taking any questions or making statements. He wouldn’t dare to actually explain his plan to strip Americans of their constitutional rights and destroy the industry that provides the means for Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights. Never mind what it would do to the ability of the nation’s military to arm itself. Forget what it would mean to the police that Biden intends to strip away their law enforcement powers. He seems to like the notion of Keystone Cops responding to violent crimes, riots and looting with a funny hat and a billy club. Just don’t swing the club.
Biden won’t dare explain that the radicals of his party cobbled together his campaign platform, including gun control. It’s a veritable gun control wish list, which starts at bans and confiscations, runs through registries and rationing gun sales, putting manufactures and retailers out of business for a single insignificant paperwork error, and rounds out at repealing laws that protect the industry against frivolous lawsuits that are only designed to harass and bankrupt the industry. It’s all in his plan.
Biden’s gun control wish list he won’t talk about would force owners of modern sporting rifles, like those AR-15s, to register them under the same onerous requirements as machine guns, pay extra taxes and be ready for surprise inspections by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). If those owners didn’t want to register them with the federal government, he’d gladly confiscate them and pay the owners with taxpayer funds. With over 18 million rifles and a fair market value of $500 per rifle that will cost taxpayers no less than $9 billion. That’s closer to $18 billion at $1,000 per rifle, which many of these rifles easily exceed in purchase cost. Oh, and it won’t make America safer as we know from the Clinton-era gun ban.
He’d force states to adopt gun registries and licensing schemes to enable the federal government to get around the 1986 federal law that says the feds can’t make such a registry. Biden would just have the states do it and use those registries to set up licenses and fees, roadblocks to exercise of constitutional rights. The money generated from that would feed government-backed gun control studies that label gun violence a “health” related issue. Once it’s a health issue, it becomes easier to issue emergency orders to shut off the valve and choke the right off altogether.
That’s just what he won’t say. None of this takes into account what happens when he actually puts former U.S. Rep. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke in charge of gun control, like he said he would.
The very future of your God-given right to keep and bear arms in on the ballot this November. Don’t risk your rights, vote – GUNVOTE.
Lawrence Keane is the Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry trade association.