Biden-Harris Gun Violence ‘Fact Sheet’ Comes Up Short on Facts

“Biden-Harris Administration Announces Initial Actions to Address the Gun Violence Public Health Epidemic,” declared a recent White House “fact sheet.” One of the actions will be to stop the proliferation of “ghost guns,” but the fact sheet includes few facts about these mysterious weapons.

This is just one example of what’s missing from the announcement.

“Criminals are buying kits containing nearly all of the components and directions for finishing a firearm within as little as 30 minutes and using these firearms to commit crimes,” the sheet declared. The number of “criminals” who have bought such kits was not disclosed.

In a similar style, the fact sheet included no statistics on the number of times criminals used “ghost guns” to commit crimes. The untraceable guns supposedly “turn up at crime scenes,” but the fact sheet included no information on crimes involving such guns.

Law-abiding citizens might expect a so-called fact sheet to include data on the kind of guns criminals do, in fact, use to commit crimes. But it included no information on how many weapons recovered at crime scenes were stolen, how many were handguns versus long guns, and so forth.

The Biden-Harris fact sheet also failed to include any information on the number of ghost gun kits purchased by law-abiding citizens. In a similar style, the fact sheet provided no statistics on the number of times law-abiding citizens used ghost guns, or any legally obtained firearms, to stop a violent crime and protect their lives and property.

Law-abiding citizens may also wonder about the fact sheet’s five references to “gun violence.” On that theme, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both have a history.

On Nov. 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, Maj. Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gunned down 13 unarmed soldiers, including Pvt. Francheska Velez, who was pregnant and pleaded for the life of her unborn child. Hasan wounded more than 30 others, including Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who was shot seven times.

For the Obama administration, this was only a case of “workplace violence.” Then the vice president, Biden expressed sympathy for “the families of the brave soldiers who fell today.” No word was said about how the soldiers “fell” in what was a “senseless tragedy,” and Biden made no mention of gun violence.

On Dec. 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot and killed 14 people and wounded more than 20 in San Bernardino, California. The attackers fired scores of rounds, but Harris, then the state’s attorney general, did not decry the attack as an example of gun violence. The 14 murder victims included black people and Hispanics, but Harris did not call the massacre a racist hate crime. Relatives of the murder victims had to wonder what Harris was thinking.

In 2021, law-abiding people have good cause to wonder why Biden and Harris ignore so many key facts and realities.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution gives people the right to keep and bear arms. If law-abiding citizens perceive the Biden-Harris fact sheet as an assault on their Second Amendment rights — that is, as an attempt to disarm law-abiding people — it would be hard to blame them.

“First Amendment is first for a reason,” comedian Dave Chappelle explained. “Second Amendment is just in case the first one doesn’t work.”

To see what can happen when the rights identified by the First and Second Amendments don’t exist, read Stephen P. Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich and Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France. Repression of that kind is the reason for a constitutional amendment that says, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”