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The bad news is that the Biden administration is ramping up its gun confiscation agenda in the form of a whopping $750 million dedicated to establishing so-called “red flag laws” in every state in the Union. The good news is that epically incompetent Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have been put in charge of the push.
On Saturday, Harris toured parts of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a former student with a legally purchased firearm massacred 17 innocents on Valentine’s Day, 2018. She then announced two administration proposals purportedly aimed at quashing gun violence.
The first would create a federal entity called the National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center, funded with three quarters of a billion dollars to implement red flag laws across the nation. “Part of why I am here today is to challenge every state to pass a red flag law,” Kamala said:
Red flag laws are simply designed to allow communities a vehicle through which they can share, and have somewhere to share it, information about the concern about the potential danger or the crying out for help of an individual and then let’s give it to them before tragedy occurs.
Red flag laws sound reasonable, don’t they, considering how often gun violence is preceded by the perpetrators dropping blatant warning signs of murderous intent (signs which the FBI and DHS then ignore)? But make no mistake – red flag laws, which enable authorities to disarm someone who has been deemed a potential gun violence threat by family members or others in close contact with the “suspect,” will be used to target political enemies of the Biden administration. Under the guise (as usual) of keeping Americans safe, the government will exploit these laws in totalitarian ways.
Own a MAGA hat or a Gadsden flag? The Biden administration sees you as a potential danger. Complain about woke schoolroom indoctrination at school board meetings? The FBI already considers you a domestic terrorist. Post support on social media for the J6 political prisoners? You’re a threat to American “democracy” (i.e. Democrat one-party hegemony). Does anyone doubt that the government will use red flag laws to neuter such “threats”?
Kamala’s second proposal urges state legislatures not only to enact red flag laws but to use federal funding to enforce existing laws to disarm those who might harm themselves or others. The Biden administration says 21 states have enacted red flag laws, but only six have obtained federal funding to implement them. The administration wants all 50 states to enact these laws and take advantage of federal funding.
Remember when then-candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke said the quiet part out loud during a 2019 presidential debate? “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” he declared, accidentally giving away the left’s game. The usual dismissive response from the left to conservative concerns about endangered gun rights is some variation of, “We’re not coming for your precious guns, you right-wing conspiracy nuts!”
As I wrote in the Freedom Center pamphlet The Top Ten Woke Lies,
The left’s insistence that they have no intention of confiscating guns but simply want “commonsense gun laws” is one of the most blatant of woke lies. First, we already have commonsense gun laws in this country. It will never matter how many more restrictions we pile on, we are never going to end all gun crime because criminals by definition do not respect the law. Indeed, the areas with the strictest gun control, such as the Democrat-controlled killing fields of Chicago, suffer the most gun violence. The only people burdened by tighter and tighter gun restrictions are law-abiding gun owners.
But that is exactly the demographic that leftists want to control. Today’s pro-crime left is completely indifferent to the scourges of gang-related or black-on-black gun crime. They never launch protests or grandstand in Congress about children killed in drive-by shootings or by stray bullets in the inner city. They have no interest in understanding, much less addressing, the cultural or moral reasons that might explain why America suffers more mass shootings now than in decades past when there was widespread, easy access to guns. They call immediately for more gun control in the wake of a mass shooting rather than waiting for all the facts or ascertaining the shooter’s motivation because the left doesn’t actually care about getting to the root of gun violence, but about exploiting the most-publicized tragedies to demonize gun ownership itself.
Leftists crave total power, and one of the primary obstacles to aggrandizing power in this country is our historically unique Second Amendment. If they were not constrained by the Second Amendment, is there any doubt that given the opportunity, all the “Beto” O’Rourkes in the Biden (or any other Democrat) administration would immediately impose a moratorium on all gun sales and implement a nationwide confiscation in the name of public safety (like the COVID vaccines and lockdowns)?
Leftwing smear organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center view supporters of the Second Amendment as brainwashed, white supremacist pawns of the National Rifle Association (NRA). It is these law-abiding Americans – not jihadists, not Black Lives Matter rioters, not Antifa thugs – whom the Left deems the greatest threat to American “democracy.”
The woke Left’s fever dream is to ditch the Second Amendment and then move to disarm these law-abiding citizens altogether – or failing that, to make gun ownership so financially, legally, and socially onerous for the average American that patriotic gun owners who believe in the right and the necessity of bearing arms to resist tyranny become a diminished minority and a de-fanged threat to government control.
This is not conspiracy-mongering; this is commonsense realism.
Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott wrote in a statement that Kamala’s “radical” proposals trample due process and 2nd Amendment rights. They are also, he added, unnecessary:
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act improved school safety in Florida and has helped law enforcement make appropriate interventions with people who pose a threat of violence to themselves or others while robustly protecting due process rights that stop unlawful infringement of the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding Floridians.
This stands in stark contrast to the Biden-Harris administration’s push for nationwide implementation of radical policies, like California’s red flag law, which abandons due process to more quickly and easily take constitutional rights away from law-abiding Americans. That is unacceptable.
Indeed. On the hopeful side, every crisis Kamala is tasked with managing by puppet President Joe Biden turns into a hopeless debacle, from the border crisis to protecting abortion rights and now to leading the first-ever federal office of gun violence prevention. She is out of her depth on every single political issue; with luck – and with line-in-the-sand resistance from American patriots – her new mission to clamp down on law-abiding gun owners will come to the same dead end as the others.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.