One of the many problems with the Democratic Party’s stance on gun control is that Democrats are already loathe to enforce existing gun laws when dealing with criminals.
Last week, an off-duty Metropolitan Police Department officer in Washington, D.C., was shot, sending him to the hospital. The suspects had been driving erratically, cutting the officer off multiple times before one of them exited the car and shot at the officer through his windshield.
The suspected shooter is Rasheed Thorne, a 21-year-old who had two previous arrests for illegal possession of a firearm. Thorne was arrested in November 2021 and 2022, but U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves declined to prosecute him. Just over a year after his second arrest, he then nearly murdered an MPD officer.
Graves has a proven track record of being soft on crime, headlined by his office declining 67% of cases brought to it. (For comparison, San Diego has a similar-sized prosecutors’ office and has far more residents it accounts for and declines less than 27% of cases.) By punting gun possession cases, Graves is allowing criminals who have shown they are willing to own guns illegally to waltz around the city, where it is only a matter of time before they decide to use those illegal guns as Thorne allegedly did.
Graves was appointed by President Joe Biden, in case you have not caught on that Biden is not serious about addressing gun violence. And Graves isn’t the only one either. In Los Angeles County, District Attorney George Gascon refuses to add sentencing enhancements for criminals who commit crimes with guns. Name a liberal city and you can find similar examples, whether it be Philadelphia, Chicago, or Oakland.
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This attitude among Democratic prosecutors such as Graves and Gascon means that the gun control policies that Biden and others obsess over are only meant to apply to law-abiding citizens. After all, if Graves and others won’t enforce existing gun laws against criminals up until they choose to shoot someone (or even beyond that, as Alameda County, California’s district attorney, Pamela Price, has shown), then of course the new gun control proposals won’t be enforced against criminals either.
Democratic politicians should be unable to speak about gun control until they clean house in their own party and find prosecutors who will actually take dangerous criminals off the streets for their illegal guns before they try and murder police officers. Anything less is a reminder that Democrats want to go soft on criminals while punishing law-abiding civilians who simply want to protect themselves.