Speaking to NPR, Vice President Joe Biden says Senator Feinstein’s DOA AWB will rise again! “I believe that the vast majority of the American people agree with us. The vast majority of gun owners agree with us.” No so vast! the NPR interviewer interjects. “It’s 56 percent. A very slim majority.” Biden: “That is a pretty good majority.” Melissa Block: “But not the vast majority.” Biden blusters, casting doubt on the poll. Block goes in for the [proverbial] kill, pushing the Veep on his support for ammunition capacity limits. Block: ” Gun owners will say that all of these lines are arbitrary? Why 10 rounds? Why not seven?” . . .
Biden: Sure they are arbitrary. Why age 18 to vote? Because society has concluded that the capacity to keep yourself from doing damage and or allowing other to do damage – you don’t let 9 year old drive – well that is arbitrary. There’s some 9 year olds might be able to drive better then some 16 year olds. Limiting it to 10 rounds makes a difference in how many shots you can let off before someone can intervene.
Block: If you look at the numbers the vast majority of deaths in this country are not from assault weapons, they are from handguns. Are you really fixing the main problem?
Biden: No, you are not fixing the problem. That is like saying, does it make any sense to ban cigarette smoking while you still have global warming going on? C’mon. Does that fix the environmental problem? No. But it saves some people’s lives. Do you say the fact that we took lead out of gasoline? Does that solve the problem? No. It doesn’t. We still have too many emissions going into the air. But it helps. I find that a bizarre argument; if it doesn’t solve the whole problem but, guess what? The fact is that it does impact. The people I go to, to look to, when we talk about assault weapons and magazines; talk to the police officers. They are tired of being outgunned. They are tired of being outgunned.
I wasn’t aware that cops were outgunned. They say they’re outgunned, especially when they want new guns, but where’s the evidence? The LA shootout? Two words there: head shot. And anyway, the po-po are AR’ed and MRAP’ed up the yin yang these days.
But you gotta give Double Barrel Joe some credit. The man knows his political limitations.
Block: What’s the problem with having a gun registry? A national, mandatory gun registry? We license our cars, why shouldn’t we have to license and register our guns?
Biden: Because there is a – this is where you start to cross a cultural line. The idea that you register your guns – it may make logical sense to say this, but there isn’t a constitutional right to own an automobile. There is a Second Amendment constitutional right to own a weapon: The right to have and bear arms. When you go to registration, it raises all the black helicopter crowd notion that what this is all about is identifying who has a gun so that one day the government can get up and go to the house and arrest everyone who has a gun, and they’ll cite Nazi Germany and all that.
You don’t need to register guns to have logical gun safety laws. This is not – there is a healthy gun culture in this country with regard to hunters. They husband their guns and their weapons; they lock them up, they use them responsibly, they pass them down to their children, like my dad. This is about keeping guns out of the hands of people who, constitutionally, the government is able to prohibit from owning those guns.
“Gun safety.” I don’t think that means what all the President’s men want it to mean. As for constitutional prohibitions against gun ownership, I wasn’t aware that the document made any such specifications. Just sayin’ . . .