It’s hard to keep up with the nicknames floating around for former Vice President Joe Biden. President Trump, who’s managed to tag his political opponents with all manner of extremely sticky monikers (think Low Energy Jeb Bush, Little Marco Rubio, Elizabeth, “Pocahontas” Warren and Crooked Hillary Clinton) has referred to Uncle Joe a few different ways. We’ve heard both Crazy Joe and Sleepy/Creepy Joe.
The pride of Delaware, however, will forever be known to readers of these pages as Shotgun Joe Biden. That dates all the way back to the post-Sandy Hook gun control push.
If you’ll remember, President Obama did gun owners a huge favor by putting Biden in charge of the effort to pass universal background checks and an assault weapons ban. The Veep’s sage advice to Americans who wanted to be able to protect themselves: no one needs a machine gun or 30 rounds of ammunition. In short, “Buy a shotgun.”
Joe even went so far as to take a position in a long-running home defense debate. He opined — based on his decades of firearms experience — that for most people, shotguns were a better choice as a home defense weapon than semi-automatic rifle as they’re easier to aim and a better deterrent.
That’s another question for a different day. In the mean time, we’ll simply note that now, six years later, Joe’s back out on the campaign trail and talking guns again.
His latest pronouncement: in order to do something about “gun violence,” we need smart guns! As he told the Washington Examiner this week . . .
“For example, one of the things we worked on early on, and I worked on with folks out in Silicon Valley, we should be able to make a weapon that, in fact, you can only, if you can buy it, can only be fired with James Bond kind of stuff, if it has your print on it. You’re the only one that can pull the trigger,” Biden said. “That’s within our capacity to do that.”
This isn’t a new thing for Joe. Not at all. He’s been telling Americans to buy smart guns for years now.
Let’s dial the Wayback Machine to January of 2016 . . .
There’s only one problem, Joe. As we said back then, there are no smart guns to buy.
Why is that? Well, as we explained . . .
(D)on’t bundle the family into the Grand Caravan and head for your local gun store just yet. They don’t have any (smart guns) for sale.
The President (Obama) loves to blame Wayne LaPierre for that, but as the People of the Gun know, the reason you can’t buy a so-called smart gun isn’t the insidious influence of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. No, the blame for the dearth of “smart guns” lies with the dedicated public servants who run the deep blue state of New Jersey.
America’s armpit has a poison pill law on the books that mandates that once a smart gun is available for sale somewhere in the US, all guns sold in the Garden State MUST have the technology. America’s gun owners have demonstrated their disapproval of this state of affairs by refusing to patronize any store that triggers the law.
They don’t object to smart guns per se, they just don’t want to force that on their brethren in New Jersey. President Obama, Uncle Joe and the rest of the agitprop generators in DC should blame — not the National Rifle Association — but people like Loretta Weinberg and her fellow travelers for this.
None of that, of course, will matter at all to Slow Joe (another nickname!). He’s riding comfortably at the top of the polls right now with a 30+ point lead for the Democrat nomination. Floating genius ideas like selling James Bond-style smart guns makes for great sound bites that media mega-minds like Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon will eat right up.
So we we can ignore Joe’s call to buy smart guns as part of our patriotic duty. As long as New Jersey is standing in the biometric schoolhouse door, we’re not likely to see one available any time soon.
Instead, we’ll keep an eye on Joe and his fellow candidates as they kick around Senator Spartacus’s national gun licensing proposal, because the race to the bottom in advocating ever-more Second Amendment restrictions is what passes now for “bold leadership.” Or something.