Tipsheet

Biden Fails to Explain How His 'Plan to Reduce Gun Violence' Will Stop Criminals

Spencer Brown
Spencer Brown  |  March 14, 2023 5:30 PM

After the White House announced a new executive order focused on the president's "plan to reduce gun violence" on Tuesday, Biden addressed his latest fiat from Monterey Park, California. As usual, Biden's remarks had, at best, a tenuous connection to truth and reality.

Pledging that his latest executive order dealing with firearms will "accelerate and intensify" his administration's supposed crackdown on illegal firearms, Biden said his order would keep firearms out of the hands of criminals by taking "every lawful action possible to move us as close as we can to universal background checks."

Calling it "just common sense," Biden did not explain how his executive order would keep firearms out of the hands of criminals who, unsurprisingly, don't follow gun laws. Also notably absent from his executive order and remarks on Tuesday was any action to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and stop those capitalizing on the open border to traffic guns, among other contraband. 

The president continued, emphasizing the portion of his executive order aimed at expanding "public awareness campaigns about red flag laws" that Biden said would instruct Americans on how they can flag people they encounter as "a danger to themselves or others."

In addition, Biden's executive order directs the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and report on "how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors and how much manufacturers market firearms to all civilians, including through the use of military imagery."

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Biden, as usual, leaned into the typical falsehoods he trots out whenever making remarks about guns. First, Biden claimed that gun manufacturers are "the only outfit you can't sue these days."

Because this wasn't the first time Biden told this lie, we've checked him for it before. He said the same thing on April 11, 2022, and we pointed out, as our friend Stephen Gutowski explained at The Reload, that it was a false claim:

Remington settled a lawsuit over an alleged design flaw with the trigger on its popular Model 700 rifle, and Sig Sauer has been sued multiple times over an alleged safety defect with its P320 handgun. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which Biden hopes to repeal, provides immunity to the industry over lawsuits stemming from the criminal misuse of guns by third parties.

Even the limited immunity granted to the gun industry is not unique. Numerous other industries benefit from protections against lawsuits that do not implicate willful misconduct on the part of the company. Pharmaceutical companies developing COVID-19 vaccines have immunity from lawsuits over side-effects caused by the life-saving drugs under the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. The same immunity extends to employers who require vaccinations for employment, according to CNBC.

Continuing through Biden's falsehoods, he harkened back to the "assault weapons ban" he says he championed while in the U.S. Senate while saying his latest executive order does not absolve Congress "from the responsibility of acting" to pursue the policies he wants — namely, passing another ban on "assault weapons and high capacity magazines."

That walk down memory lane about his leading the fight to ban assault weapons brought Biden to his next falsehood, claiming that for "ten years that law was in place, mass shootings went down."

Katie debunked Biden's claim that the assault weapons ban reduced mass shootings or gun violence back in June of 2022: 

A 2004 Department of Justice funded study from the University of Pennsylvania Center of Criminology concluded the ban cannot be credited with a decrease in violence carried out with firearms. The report is titled "An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003."

"We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury," the summary of the report on the study's findings states. "The ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs [assault weapons] were used in no more than 8% of gun crimes even before the ban."

FBI data shows more people are killed by criminals using fists, feet and hammers than any type of rifle. 

Biden's latest "plan" is largely an exercise in virtue signaling, and will mostly impact law-abiding gun owners while having little impact on violent outlaws. Does the president really believe criminals are going through proper channels to purchase their illegal firearms? Of course they're not. Red flag laws? They regularly fail where they already exist. Even NPR reported how "Colorado's Red Flag Law didn't stop the Colorado Springs shooting" at Club Q. 

What's more, Biden's declared commitment to cracking down on gun violence is fundamentally unserious given his silence about Democrat prosecutors' soft-on-crime policies that fail to keep violent individuals behind bars. If Biden was serious about cracking down on violence, he would get serious with the prosecutors in his party who aren't holding criminals to account under existing laws. His piecemeal attempt to deal with criminals hasn't, doesn't, and won't work.