With violent crime in the Big Apple up 38 percent after liberal social policies, President Biden held an error-ridden hour-long press conference in New York City on Thursday.
Biden, along with U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and newly-installed New York Mayor Eric Adams, met to kick off the self-styled New York Gun Violence Strategic Partnership.
"Just look around: This is what a partnership looks like, and this is what you put together," said Biden. "And it’s an important partnership. And we need more cities adopting the same model."
In his remarks, Biden hyped more background checks, more regulation on licensed gun dealers, advocated sometimes-flawed "violence interrupter" style programs in the city, spoke warmly of shot spotter technology of the type represented by Giffords policy man David Chipman – recently pulled from consideration as Biden's ATF director – and highlighted the new marching orders from Garland for the DOJ to "crack down on ghost guns" nationwide.
Biden directly called out the recent use by a career criminal of a 40-round magazine in the fatal ambush of New York Police Department officers Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera. Although New York has had a strict magazine capacity limit in place for decades, Biden bemoaned there was not a current national ban on such devices, a move that would have somehow made the magazine even more illegal in New York.
"One of the things I was proudest of years ago, when I was in the Senate — I was able to get these weapons and the size of magazines outlawed," said Biden, speaking of his role in the 1994 Federal Assault Weapon Ban that sunset in 2004. "That got changed. It got overruled. But I don’t see any rationale to why there should be such a weapon able to be purchased. It doesn’t violate anybody’s Second Amendment rights to deny that."
Tellingly, the firearm used in the death of the detectives was not some sort of evil "ghost gun" conjured in an underground workshop by faceless criminal armorers unseen. Instead, it was stolen from Baltimore in 2017, in line with a DOJ study that found more than half of offenders who could not legally buy a gun either stole them, found them at the scene of another crime, or obtained them off the street.
Biden went on to make sure the assembled media heard his opinion on the right to keep and bear arms, repeating, "And again, for any of the press in here, the press listening: This doesn’t violate anybody’s Second Amendment right. There’s no violation of a Second Amendment right. We talk like there’s no amendment that’s absolute."
He then rolled into his oft-repeated fallacy that a citizen in the time of the Founding Fathers couldn't own a cannon.
"You couldn’t buy a cannon in — when the — this — this amendment was passed," Biden contended. "And so, no reason why you should be able to buy certain assault weapons. But that’s another issue."
While losing no time in stumping for gun control under the aegis of the deaths of posthumously-promoted detectives Mora and Rivera, Biden quietly avoided attending the fallen lawmen's funerals. White House spokesperson Jen Psaki chalked up his absence from those proceedings as "going to the police headquarters" made "clear his strong support for them."
Meanwhile, trying to stem the hemorrhaging of veteran cops leaving the force either for greener pastures or early retirement, the NYPD has launched a recruiting drive to try and replenish the ranks of the "thin blue line" in the city. A new recruiting video was dropped while Biden was speaking in NYC, in a sign of reversing the $1 billion cut that city leaders made to the agency in 2020, which led to canceling recruit classes as part of the "defund the police" movement.
Reaction from 2A Groups:
The Firearms Policy Coalition released the following statement in response to President Biden’s latest commentary on Second Amendment rights:
President Biden and his administration have cemented themselves as authoritarians on the wrong side of history, tradition, and the Constitution. His proposals announced today are another volley of shots aimed at undermining the fundamental right to keep and bear arms and putting more people in cages for exercising their rights. While Bloomberg-funded extremists spin their ban policies as mere “regulations,” Joe Biden clarified today what we all knew to be true: He does indeed want to take your guns.
Biden’s use of incendiary terms like “ghost guns” has one purpose: cause undue fear and obfuscate the truth, a cheap tactic to force his policy preferences on the People. And we see through it. Firearms Policy Coalition is committed to exposing anti-gun propaganda for what it is, and we will continue to open the eyes of our nation’s courts to the disingenuous strategies employed by unscrupulous lawmakers with regard to gun control and the Second Amendment.
