Since President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, more and more people—including some of his biggest supporters—are beginning to talk about replacing him on the Democratic presidential ticket. Even many who declared him “perfectly fit” just a few years ago are now saying he needs to step aside and let someone else run against former President Donald Trump.
While such a move might be good for those Democrats who hate former President Donald Trump with a passion, it likely wouldn’t be so good for American gun owners, gun makers and gun sellers. Here’s why.
The most likely replacement for Biden would be Vice President Kamala Harris. While her last run for the presidency (2020) was a disaster, she is more fanatic about banning firearms than even Biden.
Many TTAG readers will likely recall that Harris has not only expressed a desire to ban common semi-auto rifles that gun-ban advocates call “assault weapons,” but she has also spoken in favor of confiscating those firearms from the millions of Americans who legally own and use them. At a presidential campaign event in 2019, then-candidate Harris said that confiscation of commonly owned semi-automatic firearms like the AR-15 was “a good idea.”
Promoting a forced “buyback” program (of course, the government can’t “buy back” something it never owned), Harris stated, “We have to work out the details—there are a lot of details—but I do… We have to take those guns off the streets.”
She’s also equally as big of supporter as President Biden of repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). Signed by President George W. Bush in 2005, after anti-gun groups filed several frivolous lawsuits against American firearms manufacturers in an attempt to eliminate gun control by bankrupting the industry, the PLCAA was designed to shield manufacturers from liability for acts committed by those who used their products illegally. Now Harris and Biden misrepresent the law by lying that the gun industry is the “only industry in America that has immunity.”
Last year, Harris was tabbed with being the top dog of the gun-ban aspect of Biden’s campaign. As her first order of business she gave a speech at a Gun Violence Awareness Day event in Springfield, Illinois. And as usual, she said a lot of the same old, misleading things that she and Biden have been saying for years.
It’s no surprise that Harris trotted out the new gun-banner buzz phrase in her first speech as campaign gun-ban queen. “The number one cause of death for the children of America is gun violence.”
Such a statement would make you think that your 4-year-old daughter or 8-year-old granddaughter is more likely to die by gunfire than any other possible way. And that’s exactly what Harris and other gun-ban proponents want you to think.
In reality, being killed by gunshot is the number one cause of death of Americans ages 1 to 19, with the vast majority of those murders and suicides occurring among 16- to 19-year-olds. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, leading causes of death for what most people consider “children” are: ages 1-4, accidents, then congenital malformations; ages 5-9, accidents, then cancer; and ages 10-14, accidents, then suicide.
Aside from Harris, the other two most-talked-about Biden replacements are Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom—both themselves gun-ban advocates who have put infringing on Americans’ Second Amendment rights at the top of their to-do list their entire careers.
Clinton, of course, has never seen a gun ban she doesn’t like, and when she ran for president in 2008 and 2016 was likely the most anti-gun candidate to ever seek the office. As Clinton wrote in her book “Living History” in 2003, “Bill and I announced a proposal to raise the legal age of handgun ownership to 21, and limit purchases of handguns to one per month.”
In 2015, she went as far as to slur semi-auto rifle owners as dangerous extremists when she said of those people, “We cannot let a minority of people—and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people—hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”
As for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, he heads the state with the most restrictive firearms laws—and also, not so ironically, the most “active shooter” incidents in 2023, according to the FBI. Newsom also has never met a gun control scheme he hasn’t liked, as attested by his continual efforts to foist more infringements upon the gun-owning citizens of California.
In the end, either of the three is probably more elected at this point than feeble-minded Biden, who proved his inability to govern last Thursday night. No matter who ends up being on the ballot opposite Trump in November, however, he or she will be a devout gun-ban advocate whose wholehearted efforts—and critical judicial appointments—will work to further undermine the right to keep and bear arms. That’s not the kind of person I can support.
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