With the issue of crime not going away, the White House is intent on reminding everyone that it still doesn’t understand the problem and still doesn’t have a solution.
President Joe Biden is still trying to paint the crime surge as a gun issue in order to redirect it toward gun control. He used his speech on Wednesday to focus far less on crime than on regurgitating the same tired gun-control talking points that he and every other Democrat has trotted out for years. You would hardly be able to tell from Biden’s speech that homicides have spiked in the last 15 months.
There are a few problems here. First, national gun sales do not correlate with a rising homicide rate. For example, between 2009 and 2013, gun sales doubled while homicides and violent crimes fell. The guns were mostly there in 2018 — so why has the crime gotten so much worse in 2021?
For Biden, this is just a pretext to try and finally gain traction for Democrats’ gun-control plans. If crime were the real issue, Biden would not be constantly pushing an “assault weapons” ban, when rifles of all types account for less than 4% of all gun homicides. Biden also apparently has nothing to offer when it comes to the nationwide surge in carjackings. Biden doesn’t want to address the real issue at hand — his party’s nonchalant attitude toward crime.
This is an issue of Democrat-run cities not being willing to get tough on crime, not guns. Take New York City, which just dismissed most riot and looting cases from last year. Or the “defund the police” movements that took hold in cities such as Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis. These cities cut police budgets and excused or shrugged off the riots that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They also saw a substantial increase in homicides.
Democrat-run cities have signaled that there are few consequences for violent crimes and that police, not criminals, are the targets of their mayors and city councils. This isn’t just true at the city level: Vice President Kamala Harris, then a senator, helped promote the bail fund to let Minneapolis rioters out of jail. Perhaps that fact strikes a little too close to home for Biden right now.
Biden has no plan to fight violent crime. He doesn’t even care enough about the issue to address it head-on. It’s just another excuse to push gun control under the flawed thinking that the surge in gun sales that followed the start of the pandemic and the death of Floyd were the cause of, rather than a response to, the surge in homicides that was going on at the same time.
Some Democrats have run into reality. Portland disbanded units that investigate gun violence, only to request emergency funding when homicides soared. Minneapolis went from promising to abolish its police department to trying desperately to bring in more officers after resignations led to an officer shortage, one that has been seen in other cities. And Democrat Eric Adams, a former police officer, is currently the favorite to win the party primary in the New York City mayoral race, as even Democratic voters are fed up with the crime surge.
This is not a gun problem. It is an enforcement problem. Democrat-run cities have shrugged off their duty to protect their residents as they rushed to embrace an anti-police ideology. People who actually care about the crime surge, such as Adams, understand this. Biden rejects it because addressing violent crime isn’t as important as pushing one of the long-failing agenda items of the Democratic Party.
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Tags: Beltway Confidential, Joe Biden, White House, Crime, Gun Violence, Democratic Party, Riots, New York City, Kamala Harris
Original Author: Zachary Faria
Original Location: Biden is showing that he still doesn’t care about violent crime
