The official party platform of the Democratic National Committee says, “[W]e believe we should treat gun violence as the deadly public health crisis it is.”
To understand what this means, consider that the Biden administration declared in June that gun-control is “a public-health issue.” Announcing this initiative, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that “when we understand that this is a public-health issue, we have the opportunity to take it out of the realm of politics and put it into the realm of public health.”
Murthy then went on to say that the United States ought to pass all manner of gun-control laws, including “universal background checks,” “red-flag” laws and an “assault-weapons” ban. Taken together, this use of the phrase “public-health crisis” as an excuse to infringe on a right that is specifically protected in the U.S. Constitution ought to alarm anyone who cares about the integrity of our constitutional order.
There is no provision within our system of government that allows the executive branch to take political questions—let alone constitutional rights—“out of the realm of politics.” Neither is there such a thing, constitutionally, as “the realm of public health.”
Though Biden is no longer the nominee of the Democratic Party in this fall’s election, he is still the sitting president.
Biden’s long record of opposing our freedom is reflective of too many in his party. This has been true for a long time. In 1994, speaking in favor of the proposed “assault-weapons” ban that was then winding its way through the U.S. Senate, Joe Biden made clear what he believed to be the biggest problem in the realm of American crime. “Six years ago,” said Biden, “it was guns. Five years ago, it was guns. Four years ago, it was guns. Last night, it was guns.”
Thirty years have passed since then, and it is safe to say that Biden’s view of the matter has not changed—and now a larger percentage of his party agrees with him. Biden’s position is still that it’s “guns.” In speech after speech, Biden has laid out a vision in which the Second Amendment is withered into a husk; in which the issue is the rules that were written for the law-abiding; in which gun manufacturers are the bad guys, and the criminals are an afterthought. He mocks. He sneers. He berates. He tells stories we’ve heard over and over, and he tells jokes that weren’t clever the first time. “You don’t need this,” he insists. “You can’t have that,” he demands.
As president, Joe Biden has been even more destructive of the right to keep and bear arms than he was in the U.S. Senate. Thanks to the courts, to resistance in Congress and to the steady opposition of the voting public, the dam has sustained his first-term onslaught. If he—or someone with his disdain for our freedom—were to win a second term, this could change for the worse. Bit by bit, month by month, the president and his fellow travelers have become increasingly radical. They equate themselves with democracy itself. They throw slings and arrows at any institution that has the temerity to defy them. They declare their failure to get their way as a “crisis” that must be fixed.
It is worth our recalling that Biden does not believe that there is such a thing as the right to keep and bear arms; indeed, it is no overstatement to observe that he has opposed every major pro-Second Amendment court case in the history of the United States. Biden opposed the decision in 2008’s D.C. v. Heller, telling a questioner as late as 2019 that there was no “individual right to bear arms that are in common use and which are utilized for lawful purposes,” and complaining that “if I were on the Court, I wouldn’t have made the same ruling.” He opposed the ruling in 2010’s McDonald v. Chicago, which incorporated Heller to the states. And he expressed “disappointment” at the Court’s decision in 2022’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
In and of itself, that is all bad enough: The president takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the Second Amendment is in the Constitution. But, as president, Biden has the power to nominate the federal judges who are responsible for upholding—and sustaining—those decisions. Thankfully, Biden never got to be “on the Court.” But there ought to be little doubt that, if he ran and won a second term and had a compliant Senate, he would have used his position to continue to nominate judges who share his hostility to the plain reading of the right.
Or worse. Since the ideological balance of the Supreme Court began to shift in 2017, we have heard an incessant drumbeat of calls to “pack the court”—which, in practice, means to expand the number of justices so that the current nine are outnumbered by figures who have vowed to deliver results that Biden and his friends would prefer. High on the list of decisions that a “packed” Supreme Court would reverse are Heller, McDonald and Bruen. Following through on this talk would represent a steep climb. But, as Shakespeare never quite said, the wish is father to the thought, and the thought is father to the deed. So habitual have calls to “pack the court” become that huge swathes of Biden’s supporters now earnestly hope for that outcome. Presently, those supporters are outnumbered, but it is not impossible to imagine a scenario in which their frustration boils over into real momentum, and in which Biden agrees.
Some voters may take comfort in the fact that, in spite of the seesawing of federal power that we have seen of late, the most-recent congressional elections have yielded such narrow majorities for the winning party as to render dramatic change all but impossible. But this, alas, does not tell the whole story. It is true that, since 2021, the Senate has been 50-50 and then 51-49 in the Democrats’ favor, and that the House has been slanted 222-213 toward the Democrats and then 222-213 toward the Republicans. It is not true, however, that the Biden administration has paused because of the tight balance of power.
Repeatedly, this White House has tried to achieve via executive orders what it could not achieve via legislation. Since 2021, Biden has attempted to demand by fiat the registration of pistol braces, to rewrite the 1968 Gun Control Act to add new regulations to the manufacture of so-called “ghost guns,” to massively expand background checks without any enabling legislation and to defend a rule that redefined bump stocks as “machineguns” in violation of the terms of the 1934 National Firearms Act. Thus far, all of these endeavors have either been struck down or enjoined, but there is nothing in Biden’s rhetoric or approach that suggests this will dissuade him from further bids. Indeed, far from being ashamed of his circumvention of our constitutional order, Biden is proud of it. Rare is the speech in which he does not boast that he has “taken more executive action to reduce gun violence than any other president at this point in their presidency.” As long as Biden or someone with his politics lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that action will continue unabated.
Already, Biden has used his prosecutorial discretion to go after gun manufacturers and licensed gun-dealers, which, inexcusably, he claims work together to “knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.” To fight this phantom threat, Biden has instituted a “zero-tolerance” policy at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the result of which has been that the might of the federal government has been turned not against criminals, but against legitimate actors in the gun industry who now have to worry that they will be punished if they commit even one unintentional violation of the rules. As a legal matter, this approach is ridiculous: our laws exist to discipline people who behave in a dangerous or misanthropic manner, not to catch well-meaning actors who make a paperwork error. As an allocation of resources, however, it is a national disgrace. The ATF, like any other agency, has a limited budget and limited time. To use that budget and that time to go after the most-regulated, surveilled and documented businesses in the United States defies belief.
And then there are Biden’s direct attacks on the legislature itself. Under the present rules, any gun-control bill that passes Congress needs to pass with a majority of votes in the House, and, given the filibuster rule, with 60 out of 100 votes in the Senate—no mean feat. When he was in the Senate, Biden cheered these rules. They were, he said, designed “to protect against the excesses of any temporary majority,” to ensure that the incumbent legislators were mere “temporary custodians” and to foster “America’s sense of fair play.” Those who would alter them, he concluded, were justifying a “naked power grab” that would have catastrophic results.
Over the last few years, however, Biden and his party have grown frustrated with this arrangement, and, on multiple occasions, they have tried to alter it so that legislation can pass the Senate with just 50 votes. During the last Congress, despite Biden’s party having a majority, this attempt failed. But it only failed by two votes, and, alarmingly, both of the senators who cast those votes are retiring. Now, Biden says that “if the filibuster gets in the way” it must be ignored. If Biden current vice president were to be returned to the White House and his party were to retain a majority in the Senate, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the 60-vote threshold would be maintained.
And if it weren’t? Well, then the Democrats could do pretty much whatever they wanted with a majority of just one—or even with no majority at all. In one fell swoop, the federal government could impose a ban on “assault weapons,” limits on the maximum size of magazines, “universal background checks” and more. As a matter of fact, it could be even more dramatic than that. As president, Joe Biden has said repeatedly that “the idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick—just sick.” To the American public, that is a crazy sentiment; semi-automatic firearms, after all, represent about half of the firearms sold annually in the United States. But to a Congress that senses a narrow window of opportunity, and a president whose grandest ambition is to relive the gun-control glory days of the early 1990s, the risk might seem worthwhile.
At the start of his term, Biden made some sweeping promises. He vowed that he would “beat the NRA.” He promised that he would sign a new ban on “assault weapons,” and that, if he couldn’t do that, he’d add them to the National Firearms Act. He affirmed that he would impose universal background checks, even if he could not get Congress to change the law. None of this happened. As it so often has, the American public once again beat back the threat posed by an elected official who does not respect the right to keep and bear arms. Should it come to it, the public might be able to do so again. But, of course, it would be a great deal easier if they voted for someone without his politics instead.
