It is perhaps supercilious to use the words “Biden” and “master plan” in the same headline. It is, after all, easy to feel superior to a politician who has trouble walking all the way across stages, who can no longer articulate basic thoughts and who, and this has happened a lot, has called other people the president of the United States.
Nevertheless, we can’t just laugh Biden off, because even if he is just a stuffed suit standing behind a teleprompter that some behind-the-scenes cabal of puppet masters loaded, he is still the figurehead of this nation—and, whatever his cognitive state may be, he is still clinging to the conviction that we the people just can’t be allowed to have guns chambered in the ubiquitous 9 mm, or AR-type rifles or … well, at this point, he tends to wander into disjointed thoughts about deer not having Kevlar vests or that armed citizens can’t buy cannons (actually, he keeps making this claim even though this publication and many others have dutifully reported that Americans can and do own cannons).
Regardless of whether Joe Biden even understands this dastardly gun-control plan, the point is there is one that his administration wants to turn into law.
Not that it is a secret plan. Actually, you can find parts of it at WhiteHouse.gov. You can hear it in the speeches President Joe Biden (D) tries to read off teleprompters and that Vice President Kamala Harris (D) laughs her way through. Most recently, Harris tried to explain segments of this plan at an Everytown for Gun Safety “Gun Sense University” conference. And I’d quote that speech here, but, outside of the usual anti-Second Amendment catchphrases, it was just so unintelligible.
But not everything about this plan is incoherent. As we get closer to 2024, new parts of this plan are being leaked to media that’s friendly to this administration; for example, in late summer, CNN reported: “Several people advising the [Biden] campaign and supporting more focus on guns, argue that the issue is … an opening to argue that Republicans are extreme and plays into Biden’s larger campaign theme of an ongoing ‘battle for the soul of America.’”
A battle for the soul (as in the U.S. Constitution), indeed. Unfortunately, this CNN article, as is so often the case in the mainstream media today, left its White House sources unnamed; however, the article also said, “Every major gun-safety group jointly endorsed Biden for reelection this week, and several of their leaders tell CNN they expect to campaign and spend heavily in races from president down to state legislature seats.”
This support (which amounts to promised spending in the coming campaign) from gun-control groups was perhaps this administration’s main goal here, as the executive action these August press events were building toward was actually dropped on the Friday before Labor Day weekend—which is what administrations do when they prefer not to have a lot of press coverage or, to be more precise, any real analysis.
So, in the few states that have elections this month—and, nationally, as we head toward the 2024 presidential, congressional and state elections—the Biden administration is telling us we’re going to see another orchestrated, though purposely vague, attack on this particular civil right.
They want to do this without having to get into the gritty details of this civil-rights issue; especially given that, as this was going to print, the president’s son, Hunter, was indicted on gun-related charges.
To pull all of that off, they need a compliant press (which they mostly have) and some fictional narratives that voters who don’t know much about this topic might believe.
To sell this political hat trick, some of the usual anti-gun suspects are floating the claim—with some caveats—that a majority of voters want their freedom curtailed. The spin here has it that gun-control now polls well if enough people believe that guns cause crimes. To put it another way: They think voters can be swayed if people think recent rises in violent crime are because of your guns.
One of the band leaders for this point of view is Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). In 2022, Murphy led the effort to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), legislation the NRA opposed partly because the language in the BSCA was written to give the Biden administration more opportunity to impact our Second Amendment rights (see p. 38), which, of course, is what is happening.
Biden is “angrier about the disconnect between where the country is and where Washington is on this issue more than almost any other issue,” Sen. Murphy told CNN. “He buys the notion that Democrats screwed things up for a long time by being afraid of talking about this [gun] issue. Many of us believe that this issue can be our ticket back to the House majority and to a big electoral win. And Biden is part of that group.”
Many on the gun-control Left sure want this to be true.
“If you really want to ask the question, ‘Who’s putting police in harm’s way?’, it’s Republicans who oppose gun-safety measures,” said John Feinblatt, president of the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety. “The issue wasn’t about defunding the police; the issue was really about harming police. And Republicans have to own that.”
As the Biden administration’s goal is actually to disarm American citizens, they are avoiding any real conversation on this topic.
Given that billions were cut from police budgets during the height of that defund-the-police movement orchestrated by factions on the far Left, that is some brazen spin, even for Feinblatt.
Interestingly, this did come up in the first Republican debate in Milwaukee, Wis., in a question about what’s behind recent crime rates.
“Well, I think what’s part to blame is that Democrats have been talking about defunding the police for the past five years,” said former Vice President Mike Pence (R). “It’s extraordinary to think about the violence that is claiming innocent lives literally every week in every major city in the country. And yet Democrats and liberal prosecutors in major metropolitan centers continue to work out their fanciful agendas, to do bail reform and go easy.”
“The problem is not going to be solved by more money,” said former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R). “The problem is these prosecutors, in these localities in the states, are refusing to do their job and arrest violent criminals.” Christie added that prosecutors need to get tough on those who lie on a background-check form.
“These hollowed-out cities, this is a symptom of America’s decline,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). “And one of the biggest reasons is because you have George Soros funding these radical Left-wing district attorneys that get into office and they say they’re not going to prosecute crimes they disagree with. The inmates start running the asylum … . There’s one guy in this entire country that’s ever done anything about that—me,” he said. “When we had two of these district attorneys in Florida, elected with Soros funding who said they wouldn’t do their job, I removed them from their post. They are gone.”
These, along with comments from former President Donald J. Trump (R) and other candidates, show candidates are ready to deal with this gun-control-group spin. Indeed, cutting away the misinformation and outright lies about this issue is the entire point of this feature.
Biden’s Gun-Control Master Plan
1. Biden Really, Really Wants to Take Away Your Semi-Automatics
“I am determined to ban assault weapons,” tweeted President Biden last August. He also said, “It is within our power to once again ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to require safe storage of guns, to end gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability, and to enact universal background checks.”
Nearly every word of this tweet is misleading political jargon or is an outright lie, but Biden surely does mean it; indeed, this is the cornerstone of his gun-control master plan. If Biden could guarantee passage of just one piece of gun legislation through Congress, it would likely be a ban on semi-autos.
Still, according to CNN, “Biden knows the assault-weapons ban he keeps calling for will never pass in the current Congress.” But his administration does intend to use this topic as a political talking point as we go into the 2024 election. As he does, what Biden won’t tell anyone is the federal assault-weapons ban that was in place from 1994-2004 didn’t save lives; it only took freedom away from American citizens who’d been buying semi-automatic firearms, by then, for about a century.
Indeed, “there was no drop in the number of attacks with assault weapons during the 1994 to 2004 ban. If the policy worked, we should have seen a drop in the percentage of attacks with these rifles during the federal ban period and then an increase in the post-ban period, but the exact opposite happened,” says John Lott, president and founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, with charts and data to back up his claim (see, crimeresearch.org/2022/05/biden-on-assault-weapons).
To put this into perspective, Biden’s latest push to outlaw popular semi-automatic rifles comes about 18 years after a federal ban on the sale of so-called assault weapons expired. American citizens now own over 24 million of these rifles. AR-type rifles have been sold to civilians since the early 1960s; indeed, before the AR was developed by a California aeronautics company and then perfected by Colt, many other semi-automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns had been sold to American citizens for over half a century.
As semi-automatics have been sold to consumers for a long time, shouldn’t these politicians be wondering what has changed? Instead of vilifying an old technology, perhaps President Biden and his team should look at changes to criminal justice approaches, mental-health issues, and other actually relevant factors to help find and thereby stop the few sociopaths and psychopaths who are using whatever means they can to harm others?
As the Biden administration’s goal is actually to ban guns it simply doesn’t like and make it nearly impossible for American citizens to exercise their rights protected under the Second Amendment, they are avoiding any real conversation about this topic; for example, last August, Vice President Harris tweeted, “@JoeBiden has taken on the @NRA and won. He can do it again.” Harris tweeted this alongside a campaign ad pushing Biden’s desire to “ban assault weapons.”
In response to this political claim, the NRA gave an exclusive interview to FOX News. “Vice President Harris should learn her history before going on social media. She’s referring to Biden’s 1994 vote for the ‘assault weapons’ ban as his big so-called victory,” said NRA spokesman Billy McLaughlin. “Yet, thanks to the NRA, the ban expired in 2004. And AR-15 ownership surged from 850,000 then to 25 million today.”
Biden was a U.S. senator representing Delaware in 1994. He voted to ban semi-automatic firearms as part of a major crime bill. At the time, a Democrat-majority in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the ban as a standalone bill. The bill ultimately was incorporated into a comprehensive crime package. To get it through the Democrat-controlled Senate, changes had to be made, including a sunset provision. In the next election, many of the members of Congress who’d voted for the ban lost their elections, and control of both chambers flipped from Democrat to Republican. Then, in 2004, the ban expired. So the win, in the end, was for freedom.
Meanwhile, even former President Bill Clinton’s (D) Department of Justice (DOJ) conceded that the ban was ineffective. A DOJ study published in 1999 that examined the short-term effects of the ban found it “failed to reduce the average number of victims per gun murder incident or multiple gunshot wound victims.” Another DOJ study published in 2004 determined the ban’s “effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
Nevertheless, the Biden administration, with the backing of much of the mainstream media, pretends that another ban would stop sociopaths and psychopaths from acting. They meanwhile downplay or outright ignore stories in which a person uses an AR-type rifle to protect themselves or others.
“A testament to this is the 8-month pregnant Florida mother who, with her AR-15, defended her family from two armed intruders who brutally assaulted her husband. Joe and Kamala ought to speak to the many ignored and forgotten law-abiding Americans who rely on AR-15s for their safety,” said McLaughlin, citing a 2019 case where a pregnant mom fatally shot an armed intruder and prompted another suspect to run.
When FOX News asked the Biden administration about this point, they received a comment from Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz who said, “The NRA doubling down on their deeply unpopular and dangerous support for weapons of war in our communities is a choice—and it’s a losing choice.”
Setting aside the inaccuracy, this was a dodge. As this was predictable, the NRA statement to FOX News also said that the “simple and painful truth” is the Biden administration is working to “persecute law-abiding gun owners” while Americans are “under siege from criminals … . They’re playing politics with human lives and are blind to the fact that their pro-criminal policies drive more people to buy guns. But, then again, perhaps the President hesitates on enforcing gun laws because of issues closer to home.”
2. More Background Checks at Fewer and Fewer Gun Stores
As this was going to print, a new executive action from President Biden had just been written and presented to us (see p. 14). This action is designed to build upon one released earlier this year that purported to be “moving the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation.”
“Biden has not been coy about his ambitions to push existing law as far as possible (and likely past the breaking point) toward ‘universal’ firearm background checks,” reported the NRA Institute for Legislative Action. “Biden did have legislative help from the BSCA in this effort, which amended a critical legal term concerning who is considered ‘engaged in the business’ of firearm sales, and therefore required to become a federal firearm licensee (FFL) and run background checks on all retail transfers.”
Previously, an individual only needed an FFL when engaged in “a course of trade or business” buying and reselling firearms with the “principal objective” of “livelihood and profit.” The BSCA, however, removed the “livelihood” element so that seeking profit alone would fulfill the required objective of sales, broadening the requirement to obtain an FFL.
Meanwhile, what they won’t talk about is that if someone passes an FBI or state background check, it only makes sense to hold the gun dealer liable if the FFL didn’t follow the law. Otherwise, any individual who lied on a form—including the president’s son—should be charged. That aside, problems with a background-check system—whether the FBI’s or a state’s—are not the fault of FFLs. This is an important point, as there have been far too many cases in which the authorities didn’t put records into the system that they were supposed to include.
And, even when this system is working as designed, it doesn’t stop most murderers.
“There isn’t one mass public shooting this century that would have been prevented by federally mandated universal background checks. But the news media virtually never challenges gun-control proponents on whether their proposals would actually make a difference,” says Lott.
In a rare instance in 2016, CBS’s Jon Karl did ask Sen. Murphy: “Why are we focusing on things that have nothing to do with the massacres that we are responding to?”
Murphy replied that “we can’t get into the trap in which we are forced to defend our proposals simply because it didn’t stop the last tragedy.”
Really? Shouldn’t we actually be trying to solve the problem? Instead, Murphy, like so many in this gun-control cabal, is simply grasping for any excuse he can find to take citizens’ rights away.
Incredibly, even as President Biden and others claim that background checks have stopped millions of dangerous or prohibited people from buying guns, the FBI’s background check system actually has a massive error rate. Studies show that most of the denials are law-abiding people who are mistakenly stopped because someone has the same name (or a similar one) or for some other problem with the data.
“The system discriminates most against black and Hispanic males,” says Lott. “When I worked at the U.S. Justice Department, I saw data showing that the error rate for black males was more than three times their share of the population; for Hispanic males it was 2.5 times. The federal government could easily fix this if its background checks met the same standards as those used by private companies.”
Nevertheless, gun-control advocates have been pushing for years for so-called “universal” background checks, so they can make it as legally onerous and as expensive as possible to do things like pass family guns down to the next generation.
3. They Want Government Inspections and Insurance for Every Gun Owner’s Home
Safe-storage laws may at first also sound like a reasonable proposal, but making people lock up their guns puts bureaucrats in peoples’ gun safes; it makes it more expensive to exercise this right; and it actually costs lives, because these laws make it more difficult for people to defend themselves and their families when trouble comes calling.
If you want to see the importance of having the ability to get to a self-defense gun fast, consider “hot” burglaries in which residents are at home when criminals break in.
“The U.K. not only has twice the burglary rate of the United States, but 59% of break-ins there are hot burglaries. By contrast, the U.S. has a hot burglary rate of 13%,” says Lott, who says research shows this is because criminals in the U.K. know they won’t be up against armed homeowners.
Next, because these laws blame law-abiding citizens’ guns for crime, they are often also accompanied by mandates (or attempts to pass mandates) to force gun owners to buy special liability insurance. This again makes exercising this right more onerous and expensive, which is why Biden wants it in his master gun-control plan.
4. Biden Wants America’s Gun Makers to be Civilly Responsible for Other Peoples’ Crimes
Biden’s continued claim that gun makers are immune from lawsuits has been deemed false even by mainstream-news fact checkers. Anyone who reads the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA)—which actually isn’t that long of a piece of legislation—can clearly see that those who are harmed by a defective gun or a gun sold illegally can sue the gun maker or seller.
What Biden wants is to give activists the ability to sue gun manufacturers and dealers when others commit crimes. This means people could sue manufacturers and sellers whenever a crime, accident or suicide occurs with a gun. Imagine what would happen if the auto industry were subject to such liability. The National Safety Council estimates in 2021 some 46,980 people died in motor-vehicle crashes. And the liability wouldn’t just be from accidents, as criminals also use cars to commit crimes. Given these opportunities for lawsuits, how long would the auto industry survive? Gunmakers, in contrast, are much smaller companies that already comply with a lot of laws and regulations.
Biden must know by now that the PLCAA doesn’t protect gun makers and dealers from liability for making shoddy products or for breaking any laws. Still, he continues to lie to the American public about it; this is likely because he knows what kind of impact repealing the PLCAA would have on the companies making guns for the American public.
5. They Want to Stop Our Youth From Learning Actual Gun Safety
In previous issues of America’s 1st Freedom and at A1F.com, we reported on the Biden administration’s treacherous move to defund scholastic archery, hunting and marksmanship programs by using a vague part of the 2022 gun-control bill the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
The legal machinations the Biden administration is attempting thanks to the wording of the BSCA is an example of what many parts of Biden’s gun-control plan would do.
“We voted against the gun-control legislation,” stated a letter penned by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). “It is now clearer than ever that the Biden administration will use the bill to attack the constitutional rights of Americans. Hunting and archery are strongly connected to the traditions and heritage of America. This outrageous overreach is an attack on hunters and outdoor recreation that must be addressed.”
When the situation first came to light, many thought perhaps the withholding of funding was simply a mistake. But upon questioning, the Department of Education explained in a statement that the BSCA blocked funding from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the primary source of federal aid for elementary and secondary education. As such, these schools have been made to choose between abandoning the National Archery in the Schools Program or finding a way to pay for it without federal funding. Even before the senators sent the letter to Biden, some congressional Republicans who had supported the bill had already complained. Sen. John Cornyn (-Texas) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who helped write the BSCA, sent a letter to Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona stating: “The Department mistakenly believes that the BSCA precludes funding these enrichment programs [hunter safety and archery]. Such an interpretation contradicts Congressional intent and the text of the BSCA.”
In the end, this effort to put a halt to the administration wrongly withholding funds to schools for their hunting and archery programs wouldn’t be necessary if lawmakers had simply heeded the warnings of NRA, which warned that the measure could “be abused to restrict lawful gun purchases, infringe upon the rights of law-abiding Americans and use federal dollars to fund gun-control measures being adopted by state and local politicians.”
These are the types of semantic bureaucratic power grabs that this administration is trying to accomplish so they can use the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to further impact our Second Amendment rights. At this point, it is necessary to note that even this expansive feature hardly covers everything in the Biden administration’s master gun-control plan; nevertheless, as we move toward the 2024 election, it is clear what is at stake.
