After his son Hunter was convicted of lying on the federal form that must be submitted to allow the purchase of a firearm, President Biden shared with the nation his wisdom on Gun Control.
A few excerpts proving this president’s knowledge and understanding of the issues involved.
It’s time once again to do what I did when I was a Senator: ban assault weapons! I mean it. Who in God’s name needs a magazine which can hold 200 shells? Nobody. That’s right.”
I remember when I was campaigning, when I was a Senator, going through the wetlands of Delaware to meet all the people who were most upset with me—the fishermen and the hunters. And I came across a guy who was fishing. He said, ‘You want to take my gun?’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to take your gun. You’re allowed to have a gun, but I want to take away your ability to use an assault weapon…’ He said, ‘What do you mean? I need that gun.’ I said, ‘Guess what? If you need 12 to 100 bullets in a gun, in a magazine, you’re the lousiest shot I’ve ever heard.”
You know and I know: there are no 200-round or 100-round magazines for any rifles or handguns.
I used to be a law professor. When I was no longer the Vice President, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Before that, I taught a constitutional law class and, well, talked about the Second Amendment. There’s never been a time that says you can own anything you want. You couldn’t own a cannon during the Civil War. No, I’m serious. Think about it.”
Joe Biden was, of course, never really a law professor. Joe Biden received a sort of honorary appointment at U of P that Politifact describes here:
The university’s faculty handbook says a practice professor’s “primary” activity is teaching, but the job may also involve supervising independent studies and internships, serving on committees and attending school faculty meetings.
Biden served in his position for about two years because he went on leave for his 2020 presidential campaign. Biden was paid more than $900,000 for this university role from 2017 to 2019, according to tax forms he’s filed.
Shortly after Biden’s University of Pennsylvania appointment was announced in 2017, Kate Bedingfield, then a Biden campaign spokesperson, told the university newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian that Biden would not be teaching regular classes.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2019 that Biden’s post “involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.”
And he’s wrong about private ownership of cannons in 19th Century America.
In dojos offering training in kendo and aikido, the above phrase written in the grass script on a scroll is commonly hung for purposes of admonition and inspiration.
These Japanese radicals are pronounced Katsujin-ken Satsujin-to (sometimes, Katsujinken satsujinken) meaning “The sword which kills is the sword which gives life.”
They are often rendered more explicitly in English as “The sword which cuts down evil is the sword which preserves life.”
This adage is attributed to the masters of Yagyu school, the Tokugawa shoguns’ personal instructors in swordsmanship.
And those Yagyu school sword sensei-s were right. The rightful use of weapons is essential in an imperfect world to defend innocent lives against unjust violence.
A wider commitment to skill at arms and a more common readiness to defend the innocent would be infinitely more effective at saving the lives of victims of attacks by madmen and criminals than a totalitarian program attempting to enforce universal disarmament.
Katsu-tempo satsu-tempo.
In case after mass shooting case, a gun in the hands of the right bystander could have been the gun which destroyed evil and the gun which preserved life.
The latest couple of manifestations of a trend fostered by devoted media coverage and attention resulted again in all the typical expressions of the phobic attitudes of members of our over-domesticated, metrosexual intelligentsia toward firearms.
Guns are regarded as detestable and intrinsically dangerous objects which need to be kept under official control at all times, ideally in bank vaults. Their complete removal from American society is so unquestionably desirable that even house-to-house searches, and the shredding of the Bill of Rights, would be a perfectly acceptable price.
Obviously, this kind of policy proposal represents not a practical response to a real problem, but rather an irrational and emotional outburst, indifferent to benefits and costs, oblivious to process and law, expressive of an overwhelming combination of fear and aversion so profound as to dispense completely with practicality, proportionality, and cause and effect.
This kind of hostility toward firearms, this hoplophobia, needs to be recognized as the kind of irrationalism that it is.
In a sane society, familiarity and skill with arms, possession of the ability to defend oneself and others would be looked upon as essential components of every man’s education.
The AR-15’s .223 Remington cartridge (the virtually identical civilian version of the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge) fires a 60 grain bullet at roughly 3000 feet per second.
The .30-06 Springfield’s (used in WWI and WWII) 110 grain service round bullet was fired at 3400 feet per second. A deer hunter is likely to use a 150 grain bullet (2900 feet per second) or a 180 grain bullet (2700 feet per second).
Correction: US service rounds were primarily 150 gr. I guess the 110 gr. surplus ammo I remembered must have been from some other country. Thanks for the correction in Comments. Complete .30-06 data here.
Credit card industry representatives have cleared the way for a new means of tracking firearm and ammunition purchases, a move that supporters say will help flag suspicious sales and reduce gun crime.
The International Standards Organization, which sets rules across the financial services industry, agreed to create a new merchant category code for gun and ammunition retailers at a meeting this week, and announced the decision Friday. The decision came amid mounting pressure on credit card companies by Democrats in Congress who urged the code’s creation.
Merchant category codes are made up of four digits and are used across all sorts of industries as a means to classify retailers, while not revealing individual product purchases. Credit card companies currently lump firearm retailers in with other outlets, classifying them as either “5999: Miscellaneous retail stores” or “5941: Sporting Goods Stores.”
With a new code for firearms merchants, potentially suspicious purchasing patterns could be flagged to law enforcement — much the same way banks and credit unions made more than 1.4 million suspicious activity reports in 2021 for other types of transactions that might suggest anything from identity theft to terrorist financing. …
Mastercard, American Express and Visa initially resisted the creation of a merchant category code for gun and ammunition retailers according to an investigation by CBS News in June.
Leftist members of Congress have funding to hire lots of staff, and they are obviously good at putting very smart, intensely ideologically-engagée activists on the payroll who leave no stone unturned in the effort to disarm then socialize and control all of us.
Gun control isn’t policy, it’s culture. And while the media often goes on about “gun culture”, there’s little thought given to “gun control culture” for the same reason that fish rarely film documentaries on what it’s like to have gills and swim underwater.
Gun control culture means paying men with guns between $50,000 to $85,000 a year in the hopes that they’ll show up in under 10 minutes and do something useful when you call 911.
That strategy didn’t work very well in Uvalde. It doesn’t work all that well most of the time.
Before Uvalde, in the recent Buffalo mass shooting, a 911 operator hung up on a store employee calling for help. The cops arrived in 5 minutes: in time to talk the shooter out of killing himself in front of the store so that taxpayers can pay for his trial and a 50-year prison term.
And that’s what a fantastic response time looks like. But by then, 10 people were dead. Read the rest of this entry »
President Joe Biden is on a full-blown crusade to regulate or repeal the Second Amendment out of existence. While Democrats are often not honest about their intentions, this has always been their true agenda. Biden’s son, Hunter, who appeared to purchase a gun illegally in 2018, could be among those hardest hit.
On Thursday night, the president went on a nearly 20-minute tirade on the need to ban “assault weapons,” whatever that means. …
President Biden doesn’t have room to speak on gun control until his son faces, at minimum, a substantive criminal investigation into his answers on a background check when purchasing a firearm in 2018.
When asked by the Firearms Transaction Record (Form 4473) whether he is an “unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance,” Hunter Biden answered, “no.”
While it’s unclear whether Hunter was an active user at the time, it’s far from inconceivable following repeated rehab visits in 2003, 2010, and 2014 for treatment with highly addictive substances. In 2014, Hunter was discharged from the Navy for cocaine use, and according to the New Yorker, went on another cocaine binge in 2016.
In dojos offering training in kendo and aikido, the above phrase written in the grass script on a scroll is commonly hung for purposes of admonition and inspiration.
These Japanese radicals are pronounced Katsujin-ken Satsujin-to (sometimes, Katsujinken satsujinken) meaning “The sword which kills is the sword which gives life.”
They are often rendered more explicitly in English as “The sword which cuts down evil is the sword which preserves life.”
This adage is attributed to the masters of Yagyu school, the Tokugawa shoguns’ personal instructors in swordsmanship.
And those Yagyu school sword sensei-s were right. The rightful use of weapons is essential in an imperfect world to defend innocent lives against unjust violence.
A wider commitment to skill at arms and a more common readiness to defend the innocent would be infinitely more effective at saving the lives of victims of attacks by madmen and criminals than a totalitarian program attempting to enforce universal disarmament.
Katsu-tempo satsu-tempo.
In case after mass shooting case, a gun in the hands of the right bystander could have been the gun which destroyed evil and the gun which preserved life.
The latest couple of manifestations of a trend fostered by devoted media coverage and attention resulted again in all the typical expressions of the phobic attitudes of members of our over-domesticated, metrosexual intelligentsia toward firearms.
Guns are regarded as detestable and intrinsically dangerous objects which need to be kept under official control at all times, ideally in bank vaults. Their complete removal from American society is so unquestionably desirable that even house-to-house searches, and the shredding of the Bill of Rights, would be a perfectly acceptable price.
Obviously, this kind of policy proposal represents not a practical response to a real problem, but rather an irrational and emotional outburst, indifferent to benefits and costs, oblivious to process and law, expressive of an overwhelming combination of fear and aversion so profound as to dispense completely with practicality, proportionality, and cause and effect.
This kind of hostility toward firearms, this hoplophobia, needs to be recognized as the kind of irrationalism that it is.
In a sane society, familiarity and skill with arms, possession of the ability to defend oneself and others would be looked upon as essential components of every man’s education.
(A revised posting from 2007.)
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Last Wednesday: Police said a woman who was lawfully carrying a pistol shot and killed a man who began shooting at a crowd of people Wednesday night in Charleston, West Virginia.
