Biden’s Calls for Gun Control Are Completely Irrelevant to the Wisconsin Case

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

 

Here are two items that, taken together, sum up how utterly useless the Democratic Party’s reflexive calls for gun control have become:

 

Item 1, from CNN (redactions mine, to avoid naming the killer):

 

Authorities identified [redacted], 15, who went by the name [reacted] as the shooter at Abundant Life Christian School on Monday morning in Madison, Wisconsin, according to Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes.

 

. . .

 

The shooter pulled out a handgun and opened fire on their peers, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said.

 

Item 2, from the White House, in response to the facts relayed in Item 1:

 

Congress must pass commonsense gun safety laws: Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

 

Notice the problem? These two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another. They do not intersect. They are unrelated. They represent mindless pabulum, reiterated reflexively and unthinkingly every time the word “shooting” enters the news cycle.

 

Let’s take them one by one. First, Biden demanded “universal background checks.” But the shooter was 15, and so didn’t — and, under federal law, was not permitted to — buy or transfer a gun. Congress could pass a “universal background check” law that required every American to be followed by drones before, during, and after the purchase of a gun, and it still wouldn’t apply to this case. We do not know definitively how the shooter acquired her gun, but we do know that it was not in a manner that could have been altered by federal laws that aim to superintend the purchase or transfer of firearms. To be affected by those, one has to be 18 and above. The shooter was not.

 

Second, Biden demanded “a national red flag law.” This, too, is irrelevant. Red flag laws permit the government to temporarily remove firearms from people who are deemed to be a threat to themselves or to others. But the shooter did not — and could not — own any firearms, so such a law would not have applied. There is no indication that the shooter had been identified as a problem in the first instance, but, even if she had, the remedy would not been a red flag law, but a bog-standard intervention from the local authorities of the sort that already happens in every state. The police do not need a “red flag” law to deal with people who issue threats to cause harm. “Red flag” laws pertain only to firearms. The shooter was 15. She didn’t have any.

 

Third, Biden demanded “a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” Again, this is irrelevant. The shooter did not use a so-called “assault weapon” to commit her murders; she used a handgun with a standard-issue magazine. The federal government could have confiscated every AR-15 in the country over the last four years — and, indeed, confiscated every firearm that looks like an AR-15 — and the effort would have had no bearing on this case.

 

What about other ideas? If Biden had offered those, would any of those have made more sense? The clear answer is “No.” It is already illegal under federal (and Wisconsin) law for a 15-year-old to possess — or carry — a handgun. It is already illegal under federal law for a person to carry a gun into a school. And, of course, it is already illegal under the laws of all 50 states to murder and injure people. Gun-control advocates grow irritated when this is pointed out because they mistake it for demagoguery, but it is an indisputable, self-evident, stone-cold fact that the only government policy that could have prevented an incident such as this one is the prohibition and confiscation of all firearms — ruthlessly and repeatedly enforced. It is telling, I think, that the only action I can come up with that would intersect with the facts here is prosecuting the parents for negligence, and that (a) does not apply to the perpetrator, and (b) is, by definition, only available post hoc. As ever, Biden’s words are cynical and hollow, and represent a frivolous abdication of his responsibility to his office.

 

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to my third item. This, too, is from the White House, and it was issued 16 days before this shooting:

 

Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter.

 

I do not think that President Biden and his friends appreciate the extent to which this act has damaged their calls for stricter gun control. Unlike the case in Wisconsin, Hunter Biden’s behavior actually was connected to one of the policies that his father demands every time he speaks on the issue. In President Biden’s estimation, one of the major problems with America’s gun laws is that the federal background check process is insufficiently extensive. And yet, less than a month ago, President Biden pardoned his own son for lying on the form that sits at the heart of that process. In his statement yesterday, Biden said that the United States ought to institute “universal background checks.” But those require strict enforcement — enforcement of the sort that Joe Biden supported openly and enthusiastically, right up to the moment at which his own son broke the rules, at which point he adopted a position that amounted to, everyone does this; nobody gets prosecuted; what the heck?

 

When this shift is pointed out to Biden’s apologists, they tend to characterize Hunter Biden’s crime as a mere “paperwork violation” that was unworthy of the federal government’s notice. But this will not do. For a start, that is what background checks are: paperwork. If one is unbothered by “paperwork violations,” then one is necessarily unserious about background checks. More important: The consequences of that “paperwork violation” could have been deleterious. As Politico noted back in 2021:

 

On Oct. 23, 2018, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and daughter in law Hallie were involved in a bizarre incident in which Hallie took Hunter’s gun and threw it in a trash can behind a grocery store, only to return later to find it gone.

 

Delaware police began investigating, concerned that the trash can was across from a high school and that the missing gun could be used in a crime, according to law enforcement officials and a copy of the police report obtained by POLITICO.

 

The steel-manned argument in favor of gun control is that, by introducing friction into the process by which Americans get hold of firearms, one makes it less likely that, say, a drugged-up reprobate and his girlfriend will throw a gun into a trash can opposite a school. When the president of the United States makes it clear that he is interested in this argument when it does not apply to the facts of a case, but uninterested in it when it applies perfectly, the public will be forgiven for concluding that, with all due respect, the president of the United States ought to be ignored.