In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Biden claimed that he wants to restore safety and control crime. He denounced efforts to “defund” the police. But with congressional elections coming up, he lacked any useful proposals.
During the State of the Union, Biden claimed that “the American Rescue Plan provided $350 Billion that cities, states, and counties can use to hire more police and invest in proven strategies like community violence interruption.” However last year, even liberal fact-checkers acknowledged that the bill “did not stipulate that the relief funding had to be used on police officers or for other law enforcement initiatives.”
Biden’s own Treasury Department summarized the spending this way: “The Rescue Plan will provide needed relief to state, local, and Tribal governments to enable them to continue to support the public health response and lay the foundation for a strong and equitable economic recovery. In addition to helping these governments address the revenue losses they have experienced as a result of the crisis, it will help them cover the costs incurred due responding to the public health emergency and provide support for a recovery – including through assistance to households, small businesses and nonprofits, aid to impacted industries, and support for essential workers. It will also provide resources for state, local, and Tribal governments to invest in infrastructure, including water, sewer, and broadband services.”
Where does this mention police or prosecutions as priorities?
To see how superficial Biden’s words were on Tuesday, consider what he said when he went to New York City last month and gave a major address on crime. What did he propose?
Did Biden point out that the Democrats in New York City cut the police budget by $1 billion per year? No.
Did he note how New York’s bail reform has let violent criminals out on the street only to commit more crime? No.
Did he criticize district attorneys in New York City or elsewhere and demand that they prosecute criminals? No.
Did he express concern over the large number of inmates released from jails and prisons? No.
Of course, those calls would have upset Democrats. Biden only gave lip service and feel-good declarations that he wants to reduce crime, but he didn’t offer any of these obvious and concrete proposals during his State of the Union address.
Instead, the only specific proposals focused on gun control despite the fact that more than 92 percent of violent crime has nothing to do with guns.
He talked about the need to “repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued.” Yet that was a lie. People can sue gunmakers if they sell a gun illegally or make a defective gun. Biden wants to make gun manufacturers civilly liable for misuse of firearms they sell. That means people could sue manufacturers and sellers whenever a crime, accident, or suicide occurs with a gun. The straightforward result would be to put gun makers out of business. Imagine what would happen to the car industry if similar rules applied.
He talked about an assault weapon ban, but in his New York City address Biden talked about banning any semi-automatic gun that “can hold” a large capacity magazine. He has repeated that theme many times over the last few years. The problem is that any semi-automatic gun manufactured today “can hold” or has the “ability” to hold a magazine of virtually any capacity. About 85 percent of all handguns made were semi-automatics that “can hold” magazines. Almost as many rifles also fit that definition.
At the same time that Democrats are eviscerating law enforcement and prosecutions, Biden wants to make it difficult for people to defend themselves. Semi-automatic guns provide critical self-defense benefits. If we force law-abiding victims to rely on single-shot guns, they could find themselves in trouble. If they face multiple criminals or fire and miss their target, individuals may not have the time to manually reload their gun.
Biden talked about passing background checks on the private transfer of guns. But he didn’t discuss using these background checks to create a national gun registry. He put together nearly one billion firearm purchase records and the government now has a searchable digital database containing 866 million transactions, including some 54 million made in 2021 alone. Federal law explicitly prohibits the creation of a federal firearm registry, but Biden is attempting to make one anyway. This national gun registry isn’t complete because not all states have background checks on the private transfer of guns, and Biden hasn’t yet gotten all the transaction records from licensed gun dealers. Federal agents can now type a person’s name into a computer and possibly find a list of all the guns that individual purchased.
It isn’t rocket science to understand why crime is increasing, and it isn’t the fault of gun owners. Many parts of the country are in dire need of basic law enforcement. Despite his nice-sounding rhetoric, Biden is refusing to face the crime problem seriously.
Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author most recently of “Gun Control Myths.” Until January 2021, Lott was the senior adviser for research and statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy.