After a year of defunded police, prosecutors who don’t prosecute, jails releasing inmates and zero bail laws, crime has, well, skyrocketed. It started early in the pandemic last year and then escalated after the death of George Floyd. Go figure.
The problem has become pervasive enough that crime was a big issue in yesterday’s New York mayoral primaries, where a former cop got the most votes on the Democrat side and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa won the Republican nomination. Both ran on restoring law and order.
Oh, and Smith & Wesson’s sales more than doubled to over $1 billion in its just completed fiscal year. It’s an impenetrable mystery why that might have happened.
Those anecdotes, along with many others, mean crime is officially a hot topic in America again after historically low violent rates since the early 1990s. Videos of sidewalk executions and people being dragged from their cars and murdered tend to have an effect on average citizens’ behavior and voting habits.
The skyrocketing crime rates around the country have finally become enough of a problem (read: an significant political issue) that elected officials — specifically, the BidenHarris administration — now feel they have to be seen as doing something about it. Hence grumpy Grampy Joe’s scheduled speech today announcing a national effort to fight violent crime.
Where will the administration direct their efforts? We’ll have to listen to what he reads from the Teleprompter today, but from details that have already been leaked by the White House, it appears he’ll use this excuse to further target — wait for it — the gun business.
From Roll Call . . .
The Justice Department will announce a new “zero tolerance” policy to revoke the federal licenses of firearms dealers who willfully violate gun laws, senior administration officials said. That includes actions such as selling a gun to someone who is prohibited from possessing one, failing to do a background check on gun purchasers or falsifying records.
And the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will focus limited resources on inspecting those gun dealers who need it most, the officials said. That effort will employ crime data and closer connections with local law enforcement and community leaders who can point out problem dealers.
Definitely. “Rogue gun dealers” are the reason serial recidivists, who take gleeful advantage of so many cities’ revolving door justice systems, are shooting up America’s urban dystopias.
“Bad apple FFLs” are why New York City’s violent crime rate has doubled in the last year. It has nothing at all to do with cutting $1 billion out of the NYPD’s budget and releasing repeat firearms offenders back onto the streets to shoot and kill again.
Skipped background checks are why Austin’s murder rate has doubled. Cutting the police department’s budget by one-third and allowing homeless encampments to pop up all around downtown and the surrounding area (including in front of city hall) were just unfortunate coincidences.
The truth is you can count the number of gun retailers in this country who fail to do background checks or falsify records on your fingers and toes. They’re a tiny minority of gun retailers that have no appreciable effect on the crime rate. Attacking FFLs is simply misdirection, attempting to blame the gun industry for a series of bad political decisions in Democrat-controlled cities all across the country.
The way President BidenHarris sees it, though, this is just another good opportunity to shiv the gun industry a little more and hopefully shut down a few hundred FFLs (who may have unknowingly sold a gun to a straw purchaser or whose records aren’t completely in order) in the process. That’s a win-win in their book.
President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget request included more funding for ATF to add gun dealer inspectors across the country, but these policies allow federal law enforcement to take action before Congress gets through the appropriations process, likely in late September.
We’ll have to wait and see what other anti-gun tidbits the President announces today. But you can bet they will likely 1) burden the lawful sale of firearms and civilian gun ownership, and at the same time 2) have virtually zero impact on the violent crime rate.