Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
By Mark Oliva
President Joe Biden said it again. Given another term, he’ll do gun control. This time, he’s grotesquely dismissive of the high price of freedom that has been paid with the lives of those who fought and died to preserve American independence. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Bill of Rights, famously wrote “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
President Biden told the “Smartless” podcast, according to Breitbart, that he will “make sure that we do something about gun violence in this country” should he be elected for a second term, adding, “this — the [tree of] liberty is watered with the blood of patriots, I mean, that’s a bunch of crap.”
President Biden specifically took aim at re-enacting the failed 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, that even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted had no effect on crime reduction. He reiterated his disproven claims about “cannon control” and again placed himself as the pre-eminent Second Amendment authority, despite the U.S. Supreme Court clearly establishing the Second Amendment as a right of individual Americans.
It’s a mantra that would be easy to dismiss if it weren’t for all the gun control he’s already implemented by bypassing Congress and abusing his executive authority to attack the firearm industry.
Punishing Second Amendment Freedom
He targets “rogue” gun dealers, when even his own Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) officials published data showing they’re not the problem. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Volume Three of the National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment show just 0.1 percent of all federal firearms licensees were implicated in allegedly illegal firearm trafficking between 2017 and 2021.
President Biden’s Commerce Department published a punishing Interim Final Rule through the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and slapped on new firearm export restrictions that have the intent of hobbling U.S. firearm manufacturers and exporters. The administration grasped at straws to justify it for national security reasons but it also belies ATF data. The ATF’s National Firearm Commerce and Trafficking Assessment shows less than one percent of legally exported firearms are ever traced in connection with a crime taking place in a foreign country.
Recently, Everytown for Gun Safety’s President John Feinblatt boasted of his gun control organization’s collusion with the White House’s office of Gun Violence Prevention, staffed by his former employee Rob Wilcox, and the City of Chicago to bring a frivolous and harassing lawsuit against Glock. The handgun maker is renowned for their product’s reliability and Feinblatt and others are upset because Glock refuses to change their handgun designs because criminals illegally alter them by affixing auto-sears – what ATF calls “machinegun conversion devices (MCD) -that are illegal to import, make, possess and install on a firearm. A dozen Democrat state attorneys general are threatening to sue, as is Hawaii.
SEE ALSO: Guess What Tool President Reagan Carried in His Briefcase?
The goal is to overturn the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), the law that prohibits frivolous lawsuits against the firearm industry for the harm caused by remote third parties. To more easily understand that, “remote third parties” is legal-speak for criminals. Feinblatt, President Biden and the Congressional gun control cabal want to return to the days of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s when unscrupulous trial lawyers in shiny suits in concert with gun control groups paraded a series of failing lawsuits to drain firearm manufacturers of funds with claims that were never successful.
That wasn’t the point, though. Disgraced former New York Gov. Anderw Cuomo served as the Housing and Urban Development Secretary under President Bill Clinton and infamously threatened the firearm industry with “death by a thousand cuts.” The objective was to bring the industry to its knees and force through court-ordered settlements gun control measures rejected by Congress or ratchet up the cost of litigation and shutter the industry through bankruptcy. Nothing changed.
Look to Another American President
It’s time to reject this mentality. There was a time in this nation when Americans shrugged off the collective blame that society shoulders responsibility for the ills that plague us and focused instead on holding criminals accountable. Instead of listening to the 46th President of the United States, America should recall the words of the 40th President.
“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker,” President Ronald Reagan said. “It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
President Reagan delivered those remarks to the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1968. Those words are as fitting today as they were over a half century ago.
President Biden, with the help of gun control cronies, wants to shift the blame for criminals misusing firearms to snatch that Constitutionally-protected right from every American. Together, they’re doing it through executive fiat, judicial abuse and regulatory overreach. They’ve gone so far as to create an office within The White House that is structured to do that, staffed by former gun control lobbyists.
SEE ALSO: ‘There are too many guns in America’ Says The Man Who Shot President Reagan
The notion that others are to blame for an individual’s failings and crimes is as juvenile as the toddler’s “the devil made me do it” excuse. Laws are enacted to protect society. They give society the tools by which to hold individuals accountable when they don’t respect the rights of others or the consequences of their actions. When President Biden and his gun control factions talk of repealing PLCAA, enacting unconstitutional restrictions through the rulemaking process instead of working through Congress – the representatives of “We, the People,” they are abrogating their responsibility to protect the very people they’ve been entrusted to govern. They break the social contract with Americans to shift the blame for crime from the criminal to those who had no part or responsibility for that crime.
This isn’t how Americans want to be governed. Weaponizing government – including the courts to cast the blame for criminal misbehavior on an industry or the rest of society – is anything but accountability. It gives the criminal a free pass. It punishes the innocent and negates rights that belong to law-abiding Americans.
This isn’t what the Founding Fathers envisioned. Americans must not tolerate a chief executive who crassly dismisses the hard-fought liberties that have been secured by patriots with their lives. Americans must not surrender their liberties to carry the collective blame when individuals break the law. Stripping Americans of their Second Amendment rights doesn’t make the country safer. It emboldens criminals and makes citizens wards of an Orwellian government.
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So you don’t like Ronald Reagan ? Here was your choices jimmy carter and for his second term, he ran against Mondale to get another term, I voted twice for Reagan, sorry, not sorry.
How is that supposed to work when business executives and CEO’s very rarely pay for what their businesses do. You know because they get all the money without the risk. People with power actually say similar if not exact things because they are exempt except on very rare occasions. If the do get convicted they will pay in any meaningful way. There is a Senator who talks about the law while sitting on money his company was convicted of stealinbg. $200,000,000. Don’t forget one political party’s elected national officials. You know, Congress. The irony is that some will be convicted at the state level.
Te reach of the PLCAA goes far beyond firearms in the hands of the right lawyers. To remove it for firearms, will bring lawsuits where anything used in a crime, or anything that kills someone will be the target of a lawsuit. From the car or truck you drive, the Jack Daniels you drink, or the knitting needles you wife uses if she knows how to knit, will all have the potential of being the element that caused injury or death.
Biden is a Fascist, asking for reason from him is akin to asking the Crocodile to not eat you. It’s in his nature to rule with an iron fist.
Can you define “fascist”? Bet you can’t because you believe what your told to believe.
OK, fine, only you can define “fascist.” Now dazzle everyone and type out your brillant definition.
What Biden is, is a incompetent pedophile with dementia.
Yep, the fake POTUS is a genuine CHOMO. Look at all the misery his Admin. has brought to the planet.
Reagan also signed the Mulford Act into California law. He’s not a paragon of civil rights freedoms.
Great so you told us everything we already knew. Why you did not tell us is how or what we the everyday individual, should stop all of this. Don’t tell me the problem, tell me the solution!
Solution?!?!?! There is NO solution. They have rights too, and treading on ours by using the Govt, and courts is one of them. They believe they are redressing their grievances, remember that part???
There is no end, as it was, and is today, so shall it be until the second revolution. That IS what Jefferson wrote about in that famous quote, but many only know of the quote of that part of his letter. Read the entire letter, and you will have your answer.
These Bolsheviks are disgusting. Jefferson made his famous remarks about the Tree of Liberty when responding to first lady Abigail Adams letter to him where she said she was horrified to see Americans killing Americans during Shay’s Rebellion, when Federal troops opened fire on American Revolutionary war veterans who were marching on DC demanding their promised war benefits owed them. Jefferson understood this. Biden the slimy pathological liar that he is, does not.
Sleepy Joe also does not know or care that the British were met at Lexington bridge by militia gathered to stop them from confiscating the powder and shot for their cannons, yeah Brandon, cannons. See ya at the polls Nov 5th, scumbag!
Its just crazy that Himself says, among other things, an ar15 was designed to protect people, yet says you cant go against the gummint cos we got f15s and tanks.
Thats threatning to use massive overwhelming firce against their own citizens, which as i recall Himself denounces other countrys for doing.
Government at all levels is adept at addressing symptoms but has no idea how to address the root cause of violence. Addressing symptoms exacerbates the issue.
Reagan was no friend of the 2A, for reasons so stated by other posters. Republican presidents, in general, in moderns times are not pro 2A.
So true. People who say Republican Party supports the 2nd Amendment are fools.
Yet Ronnie signed the 1986 fire arms protection act which actually did the opposite and banned arms and defined parts as silencers. Ronnie also gave amnesty to millions of invaders and gave big pharma immunity from the harm that they do. Cuckservatives sure liked Ronnie though.
I love the article and the quote by Thomas Jefferson was right but James Madison authored the Bill of Rights not Jefferson. Again thanks for a great article and I’m not trying to be a smart aleck. You got it exactly right bro. Blessings.
Mark N is right. Mulford was the predecessor of the ‘68 GCA. All bad ideas have to start somewhere. And all bad politicians start copy catting from there. It was fine when The Man wanted to keep his boot on the neck of the black man! Unintended consequences! When your rights are being trampled, you think a politician is going to help you? No, he cracks down. When government gains power, we lose rights. Every time!
And don’t forget Reagan banned machine guns.
Anyone falling in love with politicians from either side of the aisle forgets what politicians always do…create crisis so they can solve it! Reagan was a B Western actor who played his part while the puppet masters behind him told him what to do. Sorry y’all, don’t trust a politician…I don’t care who he is!
How dare you bring Ronnie into a discussion of gun control. I 1967, the Great State of California had not gun control laws, except penal ones for misuse of firearms. It was legal to carry a fully loaded firearm–rifle or handgun–in public. But in those days near the end of the Viet Nam War, there were plenty of protests of this, that an the other going on, and among those groups was the Black Panthers, the brothers of Black Power. The Panthers had taken to appearing in public locked and loaded as a protest of racial discrimination and police brutality (while they planned their next terrorist act). One fine day,; the Panthers decided it would be a great idea to visit the California Legislature. Although no weapons could be carried in chambers, they were free to walk up and down the halls with pistols and shotguns. The Legislature was shocked SHOCKED I SAY that anything like this could happen in their hallowed halls, and they immediately set about to remedy that situation. The proposed law, the Mulford Act, prohibited the open carrying of loaded firearms without a permit. The law passed overwhelmingly, and was quickly signed into law by then California Governor Ronald Reagan.
Although Reagan was believed to be a fierce supporter of the Second Amendment, that reputation was destroyed by his later support of the Brady Bill (unsurprisingly) and later the Assault Weapons Ban.
Cant argue with any of what Mark N said. Truth hurts. Reagan was not a defender of the 2A, no matter what 2A friendly lip service he said in speeches. We need to be more careful than ever who we entrust our rights too, don’t listen to what they say, Look at what they have done before giving support to any swamp critter. Myself, I am now solidly in the camp of a 2A (One issue voter).
I’m pretty sure Ronnie was pretty much mentally incompetent by the time the AWB was dreamt up in 1989 and surely when Billy Bob from Arkansas entered office and signed the AWB in 1994. I could be wrong because I asked Siri for the dates.