Biden’s Gun-Control Theater

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, April 08, 2021

 

Unable once again to resist the left flank of his party’s base, Joe Biden has walked directly into a trap. “Today,” the White House proclaims in a press release, “the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing six initial actions to address the gun violence public health epidemic.” “The President,” it confirms, “is committed to taking action.”

 

A more accurate dispatch might have read: Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is achieving nothing of consequence while riling up some of the most committed voters in the country and damaging an oft-deployed progressive talking point about the infrequency of gun-control measures.

 

All of the policy meat in Biden’s missive sits within the “reiterating his call for Congress to pass legislation” section — which, given that there aren’t enough votes in the Senate for gun control, means that none of the items included there are going to happen. Everything else in the release smacks of a sideshow. Biden contends that homemade “ghost guns” are a “growing problem” and teases a “proposed rule to help stop the proliferation of these firearms” — as if the gangs that have learned to make such weapons will be meaningfully dissuaded by slightly tighter regulations, as if firearms are more dangerous when they lack a serial number, and as if 3D printing hasn’t already rendered any effort to superintend this area moot. He promises “a proposed rule to make clear when a device marketed as a stabilizing brace effectively turns a pistol into a short-barreled rifle” — an interesting semantic topic, but one with no connection whatsoever to the murder rate. He expresses his intention to devise “public model ‘red flag’ legislation” that states can pass if they wish — which they won’t. He notes that his administration is “investing in evidence-based community violence interventions” and vows that “the Justice Department will issue an annual report on firearms trafficking” — both of which are innocuous enough, but don’t really fit within the gun-control debate. Finally, he nominates a gun-control activist, David Chipman, to serve as ATF director. Chipman is genuinely bad news, but if personnel were truly policy in this area, then Biden wouldn’t be as frustrated as he is.

 

The president’s proposals put him firmly in the worst of both worlds, in that they confer few substantive advantages while yielding serious political risk. Naturally, Biden cannot say in public that what he’s doing here is merely for show. On the contrary: He has obliged himself to pretend that the measures he’s outlined are meaningful and to use dramatic, self-aggrandizing language when selling them. In a few hours, the papers will run headlines declaring that the president is limiting the Second Amendment by fiat. Why? Because, by insisting that he “will not wait for Congress to act,” he has asked them to do precisely that.

 

It is difficult to comprehend how such reports will help Biden or his agenda. Every pro-gun voter in the country was just informed by the president of the United States that he has decided to bypass Congress and take executive action to advance gun control. At the same time, less engaged voters, who are accustomed to being informed that “nothing is ever done about guns,” are being led by the president’s own language to believe that this is no longer true. And for what? The application of a set of possibly illegal rule changes to a set of marginal problems, the issuing of a handful of bureaucratic reports, and the nomination of an unlikeable activist who will probably be unable to get past the 50–50 Senate?

 

Gun-control activists have an irritating and self-destructive habit of urging Democratic officials to pass the most extreme restrictions that they can think up while telling the opponents of those restrictions that they need to calm down because those restrictions are not going to get through Congress. For eight years, between 2009 and 2017, gun-controllers asked Obama to back their agenda — which he did, publicly and repeatedly. Then, once Obama had left office, they derisively asked Second Amendment advocates what they had been “so worried about” given that, thanks to his opponents’ success, Obama had managed to “do nothing.” This too-clever-by-half approach may have excited hyper-political types on Twitter, but, in the real world, it led to confusion and defeat.

 

If there is one thing Democrats should have learned over the last couple of decades, it is that there is no upside for them when they make an issue out of gun control but achieve nothing of consequence from their efforts. Every time that a Barack Obama says we need to prohibit the most commonly owned rifle in America, or a Beto O’Rourke says he backs confiscation, or a Dianne Feinstein introduces the same bill she’s introduced every year since 1993, or the Giffords campaign makes limiting the Second Amendment an issue in a conservative-leaning state, gun sales increase, the NRA attracts new members, more states loosen their rules, and the facts on the ground change once again. Joe Biden’s latest anemic end-run around Congress seems certain to meet the same fate.