Kamala Harris: Joe Biden’s Point Person On Guns – Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as the Biden administration’s point person on gun control.
This seems a strange role for many reasons, and conservatives will hate this move. Harris has received significant criticism for her handling of her job. White House adviser Anita Dunn has called for her to play a larger role.
Harris claimed during a speech at John Lewis High School in Springfield, Va., located in suburban Washington, D.C., that in 2023 there have been 268 shootings where four or more have been shot. She said gun violence was the number one cause of death among children in America today is gun violence.
Minorities More Likely to Be Killed by Firearms
She noted that black Americans were 10 times as likely as white Americans to be victims of gun violence and that Latin Americans were twice as likely.
“Parents should not have to pray after dropping their child off at school that they will be safe in class. They should not fear the worst every time they get a text or call from their child’s school,” Harris said. “Teachers should not have to start each new year instructing a child on how to barricade the classroom door. Kindergarten students should not have to practice lockdown drills and rehearse how to turn off the lights and hide quietly in a closet.”
Harris called choosing between Second Amendment rights and gun safety a false dilemma.
The Biden administration has called for tougher background checks and the passage of red-flag laws that let law enforcement confiscate firearms from individuals who are reported by family or friends as threats to themselves or others.
“Ban assault weapons. Enact red flag laws. Require background checks. We need leaders in Congress and state legislatures nationwide to have the courage to act and take action to end gun violence,” Harris wrote on Twitter last month.
Many of the mass shooters who have made national headlines passed background checks intended to keep them from purchasing firearms.
Harris Pushes for Assault Weapons Ban
Banning semiautomatic rifles that cosmetically resemble military rifles is a top agenda item for the Biden administration even though killings with such weapons is a small fraction of the nation’s annual gun crimes.
“Weapons of war have no place on the streets of a civil society. Background checks and red-flag laws are common sense because it is reasonable to want to know before someone buys a gun whether they have been found by a court to be a danger to themselves or to others,” Harris will also say Friday in Virginia, a rebuke to Republican opposition to the administration’s initiatives on gun violence.
President Joe Biden likes to say that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban reduced crime; however, the law merely regulated firearms based on cosmetic appearances such as having a bayonet lug. Such “assault weapons” constitute only a fraction of the gun crimes committed annually.
“Congress must pass an assault weapons ban. President @JoeBiden will sign it,” Harris wrote on Twitter in April.
FBI data from 2019 showed that 45.7% of gun crimes were committed by pistols while only 2.6% were committed by criminals using rifles of unspecified types. Four times as many Americans were murdered using knives than rifles.
Many hunting rifles are significantly more powerful than “assault rifles” such as the AR-15.
“Speaking of magical thinking, Democrats predictably latched onto the Buffalo massacre as a pretext to once again demand a renewed and expanded federal “assault weapon” ban. Never mind that New York has such a law, which demonstrably did not prevent or mitigate this mass shooting. Given the arbitrary distinctions drawn by such bans, they cannot reasonably be expected to have any meaningful effect on such crimes,” columnist Jacob Sillum wrote in a May 2022 Reason Magazine article.
From 19FortyFive
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