Tucker Carlson: This is an attempt to criminalize firearms in the hands of the law-abiding
Fox News host Tucker Carlson gives his take on President Biden's speech addressing gun violence on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Facing almost certain defeat for his party in the midterm elections five months from now, Joe Biden has become desperate.
He's decided to leverage the murder of 19 children in Texas last week for political advantage. He just spoke at some length from the White House about the need to disarm the population. We're going to spare you all of it. We've taken a few select soundbites that sum up the president's message. Here they are.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: The Second Amendment, like all other rights, is not absolute. This isn't about taking away anyone's rights. It's about protecting children. It's about protecting families. It's about protecting whole communities. It's about protecting our freedoms to go to school, to a grocery store, to a church without being shot and killed. We need to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and if we can't ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21, strengthen background checks and act safe storage law and red flag laws, repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability, address the mental health crisis, deepening the trauma of gun violence and as a consequence of that violence. These are rational, commonsense measures and if Congress fails, I believe this time a majority of the American people won't give up either. I believe the majority of you will act.
So, to summarize the president's remarks tonight, your constitutional rights are not absolute. But in taking them away, we're not actually taking away your rights, we're protecting children. To which you might ask, am I a threat to children? That question is never answered by the president.
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NEC Director Brian Deese was pressed on President Biden's plan for inflation on Tuesday, which he laid out a plan for inflation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
The point of this, of course, is to disarm people who did not vote for Joe Biden and that is why, simultaneous with this, this effort to recategorize the guns in your closet as felonies, Democrats have been failing to prosecute gun crimes in our cities where most of the crime is and if you're at all confused about whether the effort here is selective, if this is enforcement only at certain people, you'll notice the president never mentioned the apparent federal gun felony his own son committed when he lied on a federal background form when he bought a handgun. Didn't mention that, Justice Department has completely ignored it.
Instead, Biden's fellow Democrats in the House of Representatives spent the day debating ways to disarm you, Americans, who've committed no crime at all and want only to protect themselves and their families. Democrats plan to criminalize possession what they're calling large capacity ammunition feeding devices. That is specifically any magazine that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
Well, as it turns out, that is most magazines in the United States. Tens of millions of Americans right now have so-called high-capacity magazines in their homes. They're not militia members. They're not gun nuts. They are normal people and the reason they have them is because most modern handguns and rifles use that type of magazine, the kind that Joe Biden is telling you is threatening and esoteric. And these same firearms, the ones in your house right now, will not accept the kind of diminished magazines Joe Biden is demanding you use, and that means, in effect, all of those guns will be banned.
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Which gun specifically? Well, for example, the Glock 19, probably the most popular handgun in the United States. The Glock 19 comes from the manufacturer with a 15-round magazine. Now, the Glock 19 is not an especially scary firearm. It's a workman-like pistol. If you have any interest in guns at all, you probably already own one. But under this bill, the Glock 19 would be banned, illegal, a felony sitting on your bedside table and so would many other popular firearms in the United States.
Now, this is about saving the children, Joe Biden just told us. But how many lives would this new law save? Well, we know the answer: zero, not one. We know that because there is precisely no evidence at all and never has been that larger magazines somehow inspire mass shootings, but of course, saving lives is not the point of this. Disarming you is the point. Florida Congressman Greg Steube tried to explain that at a hearing today of the House Judiciary Committee. Watch how this unfolded.
REP. GREG STEUBE: Here's a gun I carry every single day to protect myself, my family, my wife, my home. It comes with a 15-round magazine. Here's a seven-round magazine, which would be less than what, it would be lawful under this bill, if this law to become law. It doesn't fit. So, this gun would be banned...
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REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: I hope the gun is not loaded.
STEUBE: I'm at my house. I can do whatever I want with my guns.
So, you heard a voice in the background. Greg Steube obviously knows his way around firearms. That was his gun, but off-camera, you heard Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas interrupting Greg Steube to tell him how to handle the firearm in his own home.
So, is Sheila Jackson Lee a gun instructor now? What does she know about firearms? Well, glad you asked. Sheila Jackson Lee is the person who once explained to us that AR 15s shoot 50 caliber rounds and weigh more than "t10 boxes," whatever that means. Sheila Jackson Lee knows literally nothing about firearms and yet she plans, without shame, to regulate them, but only regulate your guns. Sheila Jackson Lee has no intention of disarming her own bodyguards, for example, or her own constituents. The Democrats' bill contains an explicit exemption for bodyguards.
Even Sheila Jackson Lee understands the people protecting her family may need a lot more than ten rounds and most of them carry that. As The Washington Post put it, "American law enforcement officers ubiquitously carry handguns with more than ten rounds of ammunition and often more than 15. It is also why the rifles typically have 20 or 30 round magazines, not ten."
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Now, why would Sheila Jackson Lee's bodyguards need all of those bullets? Why would anybody need all of those bullets, as Chuck Schumer often asks rhetorically? And the answer, of course, is because it's a dangerous world and if you're serious about protecting the people you love, you'll be serious about the firearm you carry, but it turns out, and we know this for a fact now, Democrats are not serious about protecting you or your family. And that's why they defunded your police and called you a racist for complaining about it as your city collapsed.
What they care about deeply, what they care about more than anything at all, is protecting themselves and that's why their bodyguards will continue to get any kind of magazines they want and what they want are high-capacity magazines. Democrats spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to ban what Joe Biden has called "ghost guns." Ghost guns, they're scary. Well, several states, it turns out, never tried to ban ghost guns, but every state that has run into the same problem. No one can say what a ghost gun is. It's a made-up term. It has no meaning.
As a judge in Nevada put it late last year when he struck down a ban on so-called ghost guns, "Nevadans would face the risk of discriminatory enforcement by police and prosecutors alike as they, in their sole discretion and without guidance, could label almost anything an unfinished frame or receiver if it in any way resembles a firearm's undefined frame or low receiver."
In other words, any gun could be a ghost gun if Democratic operatives say it is, and of course, that's the way they like it.
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The bill before Congress defines ghost gun as a firearm, including certain firearm parts that does not have a unique serial number engraved by a licensed manufacturer. Ok, but the question is, which part of a firearm should require engraved serial numbers? That's the question. On that question hangs whether or not your possession of this object is a felony or legal. Now, according to the bill, any "essential component of the firearm" would require an engraved serial number, but here's the point. Merrick Garland gets to make the call.
This bill grants Merrick Garland, who was a craven and ruthless partisan – we know that for a fact at this point – grants Merrick Garland the sole authority to define what an essential component is and if Merrick Garland decides you've got a "essential component" that does not have an engraved serial number, you're going to jail. See how this works?
So once again, the point is not to stop school shootings. There's never been a school shooting with a so-called ghost gun. If you were interested in stopping school shootings and all of us should be, you would take a serious look at why they happened in the first place. What do the people who commit them have in common? But no one in Congress, particularly the Democratic side, is doing that.
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So, this isn't an attempt to stop school shootings. It's not an attempt to make this a safer country. This is exactly what it looks like: The beginning of a plan to confiscate and criminalize firearms in the hands of the law-abiding in this country and if you doubt that, no, that Nancy Pelosi has already announced she's going to introduce legislation banning so-called assault weapons next week.
Oh, assault weapons. What's an assault weapon? Any gun that Nancy Pelosi's bodyguards have that you should not be allowed to have and there's also a new "red flag law" in progress. Now, that law would allow the government to seize firearms from anybody it wants, whether or not they committed a crime.
Now, under our current system, you have to be convicted in order to be punished. But under the red flag laws, if someone doesn't like the cut of your jib, you lose your constitutional rights. Now, that's baldly unconstitutional, and you know it is because Democrats are suddenly talking about packing the Supreme Court in order to make it law. Watch.
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REP, MONDAIRE JONES: You will not stop us from advancing the Protecting our Kids Act today. You will not stop us from passing it in the House next week and you will not stop us there. If the filibuster obstructs us, we will abolish it. If the Supreme Court objects, we will expand it, and we will not rest until we have taken weapons of war out of circulation in our communities. Each and every day, we will do whatever it takes to end gun violence, whatever it takes.
"In our communities." Really? What's the murder rate in your community, pal, and what exactly have you done to make it better? Nothing. Mondaire Jones wants power. They all do and to that end, he wants to end the filibuster, destroy the entire judiciary to "end gun violence." A move like that raises a lot of questions. For example, does Mondaire Jones have any idea what he's talking about? Like the details because you are a lawmaker. Fox's Hillary Vaughn caught up with him today. She wanted to know what weapons of war he intends to ban. This is a revealing exchange. Watch this. Here's what he said.
HILLARY VAUGHN: You mentioned you want weapons of war out of circulation. What is a weapon of war to you?
JONES: Assault weapons, assault weapons.
HILLARY VAUGHN: So, is that like semiautomatic handguns and rifles?
JONES: Semiautomatic weapons would qualify as assault weapons and these are things that should be banned.
HILLARY VAUGHN: Almost take almost every gun out of people's hands. I mean…
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JONES: That's not true. I mean, handguns, for example, would not qualify under what I just described. I got, I'm sorry. I got to go.
So, yes, Mondaire Jones, just explained, yeah, all semiautomatic weapons, which Hillary Vaugh says, yeah, handguns? Yeah, handguns. So, you want to take everyone's handguns away? No, handguns wouldn't qualify as assault weapons, even though he just defined assault weapons as any "semiautomatic weapon."
So clearly, Mondaire Jones knows what Hillary Vaughn was trying to tell him, that most firearms in this country, including most handguns, are, "semiautomatic weapons," including 22 calibers that aren't causing a ton of school shootings, but when Hillary Vaughn points this out, Mondaire Jones runs away and probably not back to his district to lower the murder rate. He just didn't want to get into details.
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What are we looking at here? Well, today a guy on Twitter called Spike Cohen summed it up pretty nicely. Here's what he wrote, "The U.S. government has been arming Ukraine because their allies. The U.S. government has been seeking to disarm Russia because they're opponents. In totally unrelated news, the U.S. government seeks to disarm you."
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Well, exactly. That's the framing. That's the truth. Anyone who tries to disarm you, by definition, considers you an enemy. That's what you do to your enemies. You disarm them, your friends, your allies, your children, people you love. Why would you want to prevent them from defending themselves? You never would.
You certainly wouldn't scream at them from the podium about how they're killing children if they want to protect their own families. That's what you do to your enemies. And yet somehow a lot of Republicans, particularly in leadership, Mitch McConnell specifically, but a lot of others – Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – don't seem to understand this.
Or maybe they do.
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