By: Peter Suciu

Last June, the White House released a fact sheet on the Biden-Harris Administration’s “Comprehensive Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gun Crime and Ensure Public Safety.”

This called for “preventative measures,” which the White House said are “proven to reduce violent crimes,” by attacking the root causes – which included addressing the flow of firearms used to commit crimes.

To fund the program, the Biden-Harris Administration announced that it would use the American Rescue Plan’s (ARP’s) “historic funding levels and clear guidance” as way to support state, local, territorial, and tribal governments. While some of the money would be directed at law enforcement, and even put more police officers on the beat “with the resources, training, and accountability they need to engage in effective community policing,” the program also called for state legislators and attorneys generals to hold gun dealers and manufacturers accountable.

President Joe Biden also called up Congress to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which gives gun dealers and manufacturers special immunity from certain liability for their products. This could literally drive gun companies out of business.

Imagine if an auto company could be held responsible for someone who drives recklessly or intoxicated, because that is essentially what Biden has proposed.

Grassroots Support

In theory, the efforts to make streets safer sounds like something that we should all agree upon, however, Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control organization bankrolled by Second Amendment opponent and former New York City billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has hosted webinars to teach officials how to tap into the $130 billion not to address the issue of gang violence and illegal guns – but instead how to use the money to advance gun control.

Everytown, along with the Giffords Law Center, has called for communities to use the funds to reduce gun violence, which they each blame on the Covid-19 pandemic and, of course, the record number of firearms that were sold last year. The irony in this line of thinking is that it ignores 2020’s wave of violent protests and the calls to defund the police, and instead argues that it was the surge in firearms sales – and legal background checks – that resulted in the spike in violence in major urban centers.

“Violence intervention professionals used to be the police, but once law enforcement was withdrawn, criminals got bolder,” wrote Larry Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of National Shooting Sports Foundation, Inc. (NSSF), the firearm industry’s trade association, for TheTruthAboutGuns.

“Now these same gun control groups would use federal emergency funds to entrench gun control their agendas instead of safeguarding communities from violence, pandemic infection, and supporting businesses that were forced to be closed and Americans who lost their jobs,” added Keane. “These groups didn’t pull the idea from thin air either.”

The White House has pushed this plan, and while gun violence is the issue – Biden has made it clear he’d allow the firearms manufacturers to be sued out of business and would ban firearms owned by tens of millions of Americans. Biden campaigned on gun control, and while he has gone silent in recent months on the issue – as he’s been busy mishandling the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan and supporting policies that are resulting in record inflation – he is now apparently letting these grassroots gun control groups take the lead on the efforts.

There is little doubt that some communities will use the ARP funds not for more police officers, but instead could direct the money towards gun control initiatives.

The gun control groups are likely upset that so many Americans sought to exercise their Second Amendment rights, and as a result now look to blame the increase in violence somehow on the pandemic. This result is massive government spending, which has increased the national debt, and likely will result in higher taxes. The average American will thus end up paying to have their Constitutional rights eroded.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.