President Biden traveled to Monterey Park, California yesterday to sign an executive order on gun control. This city saw a mass shooting in January that left 11 dead and nine injured.
The president’s whole exercise was one failure being heaped upon another; one that infringes upon a fundamental liberty.
Biden has railed against Second Amendment rights for decades, and has argued for universal background checks in particular.
"Specifically, the President is directing the Attorney General to move the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation by clarifying, as appropriate, the statutory definition of who is 'engaged in the business' of dealing in firearms, as updated by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act," the White House said in a fact sheet announcing the order.
He wants to increase the number of instances when background checks become necessary by changing the definition of a firearms dealer.
Second Amendment proponents have just as stubbornly argued against universal background checks, alleging that they are the first step to a federal gun registry.
Conservative columnist, author, and commentator Ann Coulter made that argument in 2013, when then-President Obama was trying to get them passed into law.
"Universal background checks means universal registration. Universal registration means universal confiscation, universal extermination," she said.
"That's how it goes in history. Do not fall for universal background checks."
Despite the reports of U.S. mass shootings that make the headlines, including Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay in California, the United States fares well when compared to the other nations.
In terms of raw numbers the United States comes in second behind Brazil, with 37,038 gun-related deaths in 2019. But this changes dramatically when looking at it on a per capita basis.
In those terms the United States comes in at No. 20, with 10.6 firearm-related deaths per 100,000 population.
This is about one-fourth of the leader, El Salvador, which reported 39.2 firearm deaths per 100,000.
Although mass shootings often remain in the headlines for days, they account for only a small percentage of gun deaths in the United States.
And well over half (63%) were suicides.
These figures are even more astounding when considering gun ownership.
The United States leads all other nations in gun ownership, with 120.5 firearms per 100 households. The next highest is the Falkland Islands, at about half the per capita rate of the United States — 62.1 guns per 100 households.
Alan Gottlieb, executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, described the president’s executive order as waging a "war on gun rights" in order to correct one failed Democratic policy with another.
"It is a diversion to the Democrat failure to keep Americans safe from violent criminals who are released without bail and are free to prey on us all," he said in a statement to the Washington Times.
Accordingly, the Democratic Party’s "soft on crime" stance makes private gun ownership all the more sense.
In fact, Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times per year, according to a 2013 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The reason for the wide range is that most instances of defensive gun use go unreported.
Merely showing the weapon may be enough to end an impending attack.
And there may be another reason for the president to leave the Second Amendment alone: our main adversary hates it.
The China Daily published an op-ed Monday headlined, "US must break free from 'tyranny' of guns."
The communist state-run media outlet wrote, "When the US Founding Fathers passed the Second Amendment, they meant to grant US people a means to resist any tyrant that might emerge. But two centuries later guns themselves have become their own tyranny."
They concluded, "Whether or not to support gun control is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of humanity and conscience."
This is a country that imprisons its own people — the Uyghurs — in slave labor camps on the basis of their religious beliefs. This is the same regime that locked its citizens inside of their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And they want to lecture us on "humanity and conscience"?
But the reality is, the Chinese could never have been enslaved or locked in their homes had the population been armed.
Citing this very reason the late Hubert Humphrey, a liberal Democrat, spoke of the necessity of the Second Amendment.
"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible," he said.
Although tyranny may have appeared remote in the 1960s when Humphrey was vice president, it’s looking more likely in Biden’s America.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.
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