President Joe Biden knows how to pass laws, so the fact he issuing an executive order in an unlawful push for gun control tells you all you need to know, according to Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen on Newsmax Thursday.
"It's a lot of blue sky, Shaun," Knudsen told host Shaun Kraisman on Thursday's "National Report." "There's a lot of platitudes in here. There's a lot of fairy dust and rainbows.
"I mean, if anyone knows how to make legislation and pass a law, it's this president. He's been in the Senate for decades. He knows what he's got to support to do. He knows what he doesn't have the support to do. So, there's a lot of things in this executive order that really are nothing burgers, but there are some things in here that are quite concerning."
The effort to expand red-flag laws are "very dangerous and very concerning, just from a constitutional legal standpoint," according to Knudsen.
"You're depriving citizens of their property without due process," Knudsen said. "That's why you've seen a lot of states stand up and actually ban red-flag laws."
Also, Biden's "talking about colluding with the shipping companies," which is "very, very concerning stuff," Knudsen warned.
"We've already seen some of that with FedEx and with UPS cracking down on firearms sales and firearms retailers," he said. "These are very highly regulated businesses and you're making life even harder for them, but you're making it easier to steal firearms through the mail."
Ultimately, violent gun criminals have an abhorrence to following law, so making more laws means more laws they will just be apt to break, but Knudsen said they is one law that has proved to curb gun violence.
"I think you expand concealed carry," he said. "We see that in states that expand and ease restrictions for lawful citizens to carry a firearm and defend themselves, we see crime rates go down. This is not long division.
"The gun control lobby hates that statistic. They hate that fact. But when you look at the states that have the most draconian, harsh gun-control regimes, you see the highest gun violence. That's just a fact."
Biden's effect to bolster background checks is just an ineffective way to bypass Congress passing laws.
"So we can talk about universal background checks," Knudsen continued. "We can talk about more control, we can talk about the federal government buying up more of the civilian supply, because that's also implied in this executive order, but at the end of the day you've got over 400 million legal firearms in circulation in the United States.
"This executive order is largely blue sky."
Speaking about the issue of Chinese-connected social media app Tiktok, Knudsen concluded there is no reason to sell out Americans to the Chinese Communist Party.
"We've seen the real TikTok here in Montana," he said of a proposal to ban the app in the state. "We've seen their lobby machine go to work. But look, this is the Chinese Communist Party, and they're buying lobbyists here in Montana to fight this legislation because it's got a good head of steam on it. When you look into what the Chinese Communist Party does with TikTok, there is no value there for Montana. There's no value for Americans.
"I can appreciate you like to watch funny videos, but there are other venues to do that. The Chinese Communist Party is collecting your personal data. They're monitoring you. They're tracking you. They're trying to figure out what sensitive information they can gather from an intelligence standpoint — just from looking at your pictures.
"You look right in their privacy settings. They tell you what they're doing. There's no strategic value to having TikTok in America, in fact, they're a strategic threat to our country."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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