President Joe Biden on Saturday commemorated the 25th anniversary of the tragic Columbine High School shooting in Colorado by once against pushing for more restrictions on firearms. In a written statement, the president argued for Congress to pass another assault weapons ban, along with other anti-gunner measures supposedly intended to curb gun violence in America.
Biden’s arguments are merely a regurgitation of the emotional rhetoric Democrats have used to justify passing legislation aimed at infringing on the right to keep and bear arms. However, even a slightly deeper look at the situation reveals that these policies would not only fail to address gun violence, but they would only succeed at making it more difficult for people to own firearms.
In the statement, Biden brought up the shooting, recounted how “two students walked into Columbine High School with assault weapons and other firearms they obtained without background checks” and “killed twelve of their fellow students and one teacher, injuring nearly two dozen others, and transforming classrooms into crime scenes.”
Since Columbine, over 400 school shootings have exposed over 370,000 students to the horrors of gun violence. From Newtown to Parkland to Uvalde, we have seen communities across the nation be torn apart by senseless violence. Students across the country now learn how to duck and cover before they learn how to read and write. This violence must end.
I’ve met with countless families who’ve lost loved ones because of gun violence. Their message is always the same: do something.
And, what is the “something” that Biden wants to do? Push for restrictions on law-abiding gun owners. He touted his administration’s creation of “the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention” and signed “the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.”
The president highlighted the White House’s “largest expansion of the gun background check requirement since 1993,” which they say addressed “the loophole that allowed the Columbine shooters to obtain guns.”
Then, Biden called for even more anti-gun legislation.
My Administration will continue taking action, but Congress must do their part. We need universal background checks, a national red flag law, and we must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. We need Congress to do something—do something—so that communities won’t continue to suffer due to the epidemic of gun violence.
Biden’s remarks reference the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which lapsed in 2004. However, hindsight reveals that the legislation did nothing to curb gun violence, but was only effective at infringing on the Second Amendment.
For starters, the term “assault weapons” is a nebulous moniker that anti-gunners use to apply to any scary-looking black gun that they wish to take out of the hands of lawful gun owners. Any firearm can be used to assault someone – or protect people from being assaulted. It is nothing more than an exhibition showing how adept leftists are at manipulating language to promote false narratives intended to fearmonger about the idea of regular folks owning weapons.
A report compiled by the federal government in 2004 assessing the efficacy of the ban noted that while the use of “assault weapons” in gun crimes decreased, “the decline in [assault weapon] use was offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns equipment with [large capacity magazines] in jurisdictions studied.”
The report also noted that any further reduction in gun violence because of the ban would “be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
Another study revealed that assault weapons bans “do not seem to be associated with the incidence of fatal mass shootings.”
Multiple studies have produced similar findings: Assault weapons bans do not work.
However, there is evidence that allowing the public to keep and bear arms has helped to save lives from mass shooters. The Crime Prevention Research Center published a study last year showing that there are plenty of situations in which armed civilians stopped mass shootings – data that the FBI and other federal agencies would prefer to keep hidden.
The report noted that the FBI’s statistics on these cases do not tell the whole story. The Bureau says armed citizens have stopped only 14 out of the 302 active shooter incidents between 2014 and 2022. The media has used these numbers to paint the picture that this rarely happens.
However, the CPRC’s report reveals that 41 percent of active shooting incidents were stopped by armed citizens. Furthermore, in incidents taking place outside of “gun-free zones,” 63 percent of active shooting cases were stopped by a “good guy with a gun.”
The organization’s report shows that, in reality, armed civilians stopped about 157 out of 440 active shooter situations during the aforementioned time period. Dr. John R. Lott Jr., the head of the CPRC, indicated that this discrepancy is the result of FBI oversights and misclassifications, including omitting cases in which armed citizens scared away attackers or were mistaken for security personnel.
Nobody wants to see more mass shootings resulting in untold numbers of victims. This is what prompts the “do something” mentality that Biden is exploiting. However, it is abundantly evident that cracking down on the Second Amendment was never the answer. Not only does it fail to stop gun homicides, but it also leaves people more vulnerable who do not care about Democrats’ cherished gun control laws.