Despite the fact that the United States seems to have enough problems with the COVID-19 epidemic and racially motivated clashes today, the new US President Joe Biden is enthusiastically engaged in seemingly not the most pressing issues for official Washington.
The owner of the White House either places ships thousands of kilometers from the American borders – off the coast of Russia and China, then declares war on his own compatriots from among the owners of firearms.
Recently, Biden demanded that the US Congress ban the sale of assault rifles and large-capacity stores at the state level.
“Violence with firearms in this country is an epidemic. And this is an international shame”, – he said.
Indeed, in just a month, there were 29 shooting incidents in the United States that killed people.
“I don’t have to wait a minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps that will save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act”, – Biden said.
The White House is preparing a whole range of private measures to restrict the sale of weapons (such as a ban on the sale of a number of components and hand latches that increase the accuracy of fire), but the main target of the new US president seems to be assault rifles.
However, both Biden and his political associates in the Democratic Party played the “weapon card” during last year’s election campaign. The Democratic candidate himself made relevant statements, and his entourage fought with the “weapon lobbyists”.
New York Attorney General Laetitia James filed a lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court against the US National Rifle Association, accusing the organization’s leadership of fraud, the use of charitable funds for personal purposes and a number of other violations. The representative of the Democrats, in particular, did not like the high salaries and hospitality costs of the “shooters”. Experts then noted a “strange” coincidence – the Democratic prosecutor “let the dogs down” on the association that had previously donated $ 30 million for Trump’s election campaign, and just before the election, although she could have done it earlier. As a result, the NSA was fined $2.5 million for insurance violations, and now launched bankruptcy proceedings in order to subsequently change the place of registration from New York to Texas.
At first glance, the Democrats’ attack on US weapons legislation has its own logic. In 2017, nearly 40,000 people died from firearms in the United States. About 60% of them committed suicide, 37% became victims of murder, another 3% died for other reasons (due to accidents or were shot by the police). About three quarters of all murders in the United States are associated with firearms.
The death rate from firearms in the United States is several times higher than in other developed countries. According to this indicator, the United States is in 20th place in the world, behind mainly Latin American states such as El Salvador, Colombia and Honduras.
Democrats and the liberal media sympathetic to them are trying to explain this precisely by the freedom of access of Americans to “firearms”.
There are about 300 million barrels on hand in the United States, and about 42% of American families keep weapons at home. The Americans, who make up only 4.4% of the world’s population, account for about 42% of the world’s weapons.
Moreover, the most armed states are the southern and midwestern states, in which the Republican support is traditionally great. The liberal inhabitants of the East Coast and California have fewer guns and pistols. It would seem that disarm white bearded men in the swamps of the Mississippi floodplain and in the mountains of Alaska – and all problems will be solved by themselves.
But it’s not that simple.
Inhabitants of large cities, traditionally voting for Democrats, can really dial 9-1-1 in any unforeseen situation and call the police or other emergency services. But what do farmers living in the wilderness do? But a significant part of the United States is land covered with forests, mountains or huge corn fields.
The wilderness atmosphere featured in popular American horror films is in fact not uncommon in the United States. And you can face anyone in such a wilderness – from grizzly bears and alligators to maniacs and migrants with a criminal past moving away from the Mexican border. If something happened – and the only one on the vast territory of the sheriff can wait a very long time. And this, if you are even lucky enough to get through to him. Depriving people living in the wilderness of the only opportunity for effective self-defense does not seem entirely humane.
Another fundamental point is the very structure of crimes committed with the use of “firearms”. So, according to the FBI, in 2016 more than 11 thousand people were killed with the use of firearms. More than 7 thousand of them were from pistols. But rifles accounted for 374 kills – just over 3% of their total. So, with such statistics, can a ban on the sale of assault rifles significantly affect the level of lethal armed attacks in the country? The answer is obvious.
And one more remarkable point. African Americans and Hispanics (Biden’s Democratic electorate) are far more likely to shoot fires than whites in the United States.
Thus, the guys with rifles living in the mountains and prairies of the Midwest practically do not spoil the crime statistics in the United States. Therefore, in order to reduce the number of murders, logically, it is necessary not to limit the sale of “assault firearms”, but first of all to pay attention to the short-barreled weapons of concealed carrying, which gangsters from “black quarters” like to use. Better yet, tackle the social and economic problems of black people, and instead of shouting about “Saint Floyd”, take care of providing black children with access to quality education. But this, apparently, is not as profitable for the democrats as shedding crocodile tears for a criminal who held a pistol to the belly of a pregnant woman during a robbery.
However, their goals, obviously, are not limited to “transferring the arrows”. It seems that Biden and his entourage are worried about the Republicans (including Donald Trump) having an army of motivated and well-trained supporters with weapons equal to the military standards.
Therefore, instead of restricting access to pistols popular among gangsters, Democrats declare a “crusade” against people who, according to statistics, are just the least dangerous to society. Moreover, this “campaign” is accompanied by strong support from the leading liberal media.
“Experience shows that banning assault weapons will save lives. Thoughts and prayers will not stop bloodshed and tears. But a well-thought-out ban on assault weapons would reduce the number and lethality of mass shootings”, – reads a letter to the editor published in the New York Times.
Moreover, with the coming of Joe Biden to power, the number of mass shootings in the United States increased sharply. Although this, of course, can be attributed to a simple coincidence …
Svyatoslav Knyazev, Centenary