Biden Administration Running Amok

 Over at the American Thinker today, Andrea Widburg has a post entitled Biden Takes Aim At Massive Numbers of American Guns. She is writing about the fact that Biden has said the quiet part out loud; that he wants to ban all semiautomatic weapons. I would guess that most handguns produced and sold today are semiautomatic. These weapons have been around since the late 1800s, and have become very reliable. Of course, the sidearm that served veterans in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam was the semiautomatic M1911 and M1911a1. It is still produced today by such as Springfield Armory, Kimber, Wilson Combat and others, too numerous to mention. So, Biden wants to ban these along with AR 15 and AK 47 pattern rifles. But, again he would also ban the much beloved M1 Garand rifles used in WWII.

When leftists hear “semi-automatic weapon,” they instantly imagine machine guns, endlessly spraying thousands of rounds a minute, with no stopping, as long as the shooter keeps his finger on the trigger. In fact, it’s extremely difficult for consumers to get fully automatic weapons and I’m hard-pressed to think of any mass murder on American soil since the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 with then-legal Tommy guns.

Semi-automatic weapons are not machine guns. They require that the shooter pull the trigger for every shot fired. However, instead of having to manually rechamber a round after every shot (think of that “chik-chak” sound associated with Granny Clampett’s shotgun), a semi-automatic will automatically rechamber a round.

This speeds up the process somewhat and is definitely a convenience. Indeed, for women, who have smaller and weaker hands, both of which interfere with chambering a round manually, a semi-automatic weapon may be the difference between life and death if they’re fighting off a large, fast assailant.

Ms. Widburg notes that there are a lot of semiautomatic weapons in the United States. Indeed it may be as high as 52.4 million. What are the chances that Biden can round all those up? First of all, there will be no record for anything built before 1968, and that includes a lot of M1911 pattern pistols. Second, will criminals give up their guns? Does the government even know which criminals have which guns (I am being facetious here)? Of course, they don't, and in any case, it is clear that they don't care about criminals having guns. If they did, they would enforce the gun laws on the books. Third, a certain number of Americans will meekly turn in their guns, but I suspect the vast majority will not. We have seen what happened in Australia and the Formerly Great Britain, so are unlikely to cooperate.

Ms. Widburg makes note of the fact that by confiscating these weapons, the government will be denying us the ability to defend ourselves IF the government becomes oppressive:

In other words, because two deeply disturbed men made headlines, you must lose your self-protection. More than that, you need to lose your constitutionally guaranteed self-protection. And even more specifically, given that the biggest killer in every society, always, is a government that has run amok (see, e.g., Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea, China, Cambodia, etc.), the head of our government is demanding that we lose our constitutionally guaranteed self-protection against that very government should it ever begin to run amok.

I don't know, but I think if the government enacts such a law, perhaps it is already running amok?