Virtually every public opinion poll these days seems to deliver bad news for Joe Biden. One recent poll put his general approval at only 43%, but even more troubling for the current White House occupant was that only 28% of the respondents in that poll want him to run for reelection in 2024.
And that was all before Russia invaded Ukraine. Future polls will likely see Biden’s stock plummet even more.
To make matters worse, however, is the fact that Biden also seems to be falling out of favor with at least one core group that worked in lock-step to help get him elected in 2020; anti-gun extremists.
The 2020 Biden campaign was supported with millions of dollars from anti-gun billionaire Mike Bloomberg, and endorsed by every major anti-gun group (many of which are also kept afloat with Bloomberg money). Those groups expected an immediate return on their investments, and some seem pretty upset that the Second Amendment has not yet been torn from our Bill of Rights.
March for Our Lives (MOL), a self-described “youth-led movement,” went so far as to issue Biden certain demands shortly after he took office. Nearly a year after submitting its missive, and with nary a single demand met, MOL now seems to be on the attack, and its target is the very president it helped elect.
Partnering with two other anti-gun organizations—Guns Down America and Change the Ref—MOL has created a new website called Shock Market: Tracking Gun Violence Losses Under Biden.
Of course, being a product of an anti-gun organization, the data promoted on this new site is simply regurgitated and repackaged material from other anti-gun researchers and propagandists; those at Gun Violence Archive.
Both websites manipulate categories and definitions to suit their anti-gun narratives, and paint every firearm-related injury or fatality with the same broad, anti-gun brush. Lawful, defensive uses of firearms are treated exactly the same as violent firearm-related crimes committed by career criminals and crazed psychotics.
The tracking, as the site says, begins with Biden’s inauguration, and refers to “gun deaths and injuries reach(ing) crisis levels across the country.” That would seem to imply that MOL is blaming Biden for the crisis, as they allege “Biden has fallen far short of the gun violence reform he promised during his campaign….”
But is that really a fair assessment?
Violent crime of all types, not just those crimes that also involve someone using a firearm, have reached alarming levels. While many of Biden’s policies may be to blame, at least in part, for rising violent crime, his inability to enact new gun control certainly isn’t.
The fact of the matter is that rising violent crime is not now, nor has it ever been, because of law-abiding citizens being able to exercise their rights protected under the Second Amendment, in spite of what MOL might want to allege. While the new Shock Market website is bereft of any specific policy goals, MOL does support a litany of anti-gun proposals that would only impact law-abiding gun owners.
The group supports national licensing and registration schemes (schemes from which criminals would be exempt because of the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination); banning the most popular semi-automatic firearms and magazines; disarming gun owners who pose, in MOL’s view, “a harm risk;” and a national “buy-back” program for ALL firearms currently owned by law-abiding gun owners.
MOL also supports the government targeting NRA to be harassed by federal bureaucrats from the IRS and FEC, and calls for a repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) so that the lawful firearms industry may be sued into oblivion through an avalanche of reckless, meritless lawsuits.
Blaming NRA, law-abiding gun owners, and the firearms industry for the acts of violent criminals is nothing new from anti-gun extremists. But blaming Biden for the current rise in crime is certainly a new tactic for those in favor of gun control.
The real problems that are feeding the rise in crime in America are numerous, but the vast majority of them emanate from the state and local level, not the federal level. Failing to rein in the violence that took place at countless protests during 2020, calls to “defund the police,” kicking convicted criminals and those pending trial out of jail as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and soft-on-crime prosecutors are the most likely culprits for our national crime surge.
These soft-on-crime prosecutors have employed truly dangerous policies, such as refusing to prosecute those accused of actual violent crimes, turning serious felony offenses into misdemeanors, dramatically changing the approach to responding to violent crime, and virtually eliminating any form of bail so that even violent, repeat offenders find themselves walking our streets sometimes mere hours after being caught breaking the law.
A recent case we reported involving someone from the MOL fold—who was charged with attempted murder…using a handgun—adds a touch of nearly-tragic irony to the discussion of MOL dishonesty when it talks about violent crime and what might be appropriate responses.
One could certainly argue that the President could use the power of his office to urge changes on all of these fronts. And considering virtually all of the people who support the aforementioned policies that have likely led to the current spike in crime come from the radical fringe of his party, he could use his power as the leader of the Democrat Party to try to rein them in.
In that vein, and to his credit, he has at least begun to make public statements trying to distance himself from “defund the police” messaging, although such statements do still include dishonest attacks on law-abiding gun owners and the Second Amendment.
His ham-fisted and predictable response to the rise in violent crime has been, of course, to blame law-abiding gun owners and the Second Amendment. We would have thought that’s the kind of response the kids at MOL would support with wild exuberance.
Apparently, that’s not enough. Biden even offered up a radical, anti-gun lobbyist to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), but even moderate Democrats balked at such an outlandish nominee. We all know how that worked out, which led to the disgraced nominee lashing out at everyone possible to blame for his personal failure to become ATF Director.
Still, not enough for the kids at MOL.
Perhaps MOL is hoping its new website will shame Biden into taking cues from our neighbors to the north, inspiring our president to try to impose gun control by executive fiat, the way Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has—not to mention Trudeau’s penchant for abusing his authority to intimidate and silence those who do not share his views.
Thankfully, our Founders built better safeguards into our nation’s governing documents. The US Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, has far greater protections of individual liberty, including the right to arms, than anything Canada has to offer. While we don’t think Biden has a very solid grasp on what the Second Amendment actually says or means, he likely understands his office does not grant him the kind of abusive power we have seen wielded above our northern border, in spite of what MOL may want him to do.