By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
Some politicians address challenges head-on. Others attempt distractions, changing the subject in the hope that the public will forget the ongoing disasters of their governance.
It should be no surprise by now that Joe Biden falls in the latter group.
As the American economy continues to stagnate, with high inflation, a sluggish stock market, and the promise of home ownership moving into unreachable territory, Joe Biden has returned to one of his favorite cons: the idea that he can make Americans safer by expanding unconstitutional gun control measures.
As America’s financial pages attempted to learn from the sudden collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank this week, and as serious politicians attempted to alert the public to the disastrous policies causing this economic destruction, Joe Biden gathered his fawning press around him and flew to California, to give a speech at the site of a recent shooting, to announce yet another of his many unconstitutional executive orders.
Hardly any gun purchases today do not require a background check; but thanks to his latest E.O., a few more of the few purchases remaining without a check will now be required to have one.
Buy a gun; undergo a background check. Big deal.
It sounds like common sense to some, so it doesn’t horrify most of us… because, after all, most of us will pass that background check.
Almost everyone who buys a gun in America is a perfectly legal consumer, after all. Most of us are law-abiding citizens with every right to keep and bear arms.
It should be a two or three day delay, but these federal background checks often take inexplicably long. But it should be short, anyway. So it’s hard to gin up a great deal of anger at this particular relatively small, incremental advance of the gun control agenda.
As government intrusions upon our lives go, this one just doesn’t seem like a horrible one, to most of us. So we don’t get too furious about it.
But Joe Biden‘s base is invigorated, happy to see that he is continuing to deliver on the promises he makes to the Left every day: ever more restrictions on law-abiding American citizens, 24/7. That unrelenting attack continues.
But as free citizens of the United States, we owe ourselves and our country a deeper exploration of the subject.
Do these gun control measures really help at all, however, little?
Or does it actually hurt? Does gun control – aimed as it is at the law-abiding citizen rather than the violent criminal – perhaps do actual damage, because by issuing this order, the Biden-Harris administration dodges its obligation to really do something substantial to reduce violence?
The problem is hardly imaginary, after all. There is indeed a terrible problem with criminal violence in the United States today. Robberies, rapes, murders, burglaries, drive-by shootings, home invasions, gang wars.
Across the country, a coalition between federal regulatory authorities and blue state tyrants is making it ever more difficult for law-abiding citizens to obtain the weapons they need to present some counter to America’s criminal element.
And at the same time, America’s criminal element is growing.
Why? For a number of very specific, very intentional reasons.
The Democratic Party’s open borders policy – which includes a spate of “sanctuary cities” run by corrupt local officials – doesn’t just allow in countless poor people fleeing the Third World for our economic opportunity. It also draws a substantial criminal element, both organized, as members of global crime gangs, and unorganized, as individual criminals fleeing countries where they’re on Wanted posters, happy to see that the United States don’t yet realize we should fear them.
Democrat governors take every opportunity to fling open the doors of their prisons, releasing convicted violent felons on every pretense from overcrowding to fear of Covid, from imagined budget constraints to a need for political support when elections approach.
And Joe Biden has done his best to appoint judges, and even a Supreme Court associate justice, who don’t believe in imprisonment at all; who make up any reason they can think of to set convicted criminals free.
On purpose.
Right down to the local level, this fifty-year-plus assault on America’s criminal justice system has produced county prosecutors who refuse to prosecute, city police who are forbidden to arrest criminals, urban budgets that fund generous giveaways for criminals while denying police resources desperately needed for the protection of innocent pedestrians, residents, businesses and travelers.
But what makes the news? Joe Biden’s speech on gun control. What registers in the polls? The Biden-Harris administration’s “dedication to the cause of getting guns off the streets.”
Newsflash: the gun purchases that these measures are slowing down have absolutely nothing to do with the streets. Criminals will still get weapons; their victims will just have a harder time defending themselves.
Here is the reality of modern Democrat crime policy:
Third World drug gangs are invited into our cities; the law-abiding residents of those cities are left to be sitting ducks.
A violent ex-boyfriend who belongs in jail is out free thanks to a no-prosecution policy; his ex-girlfriend and her children are intended to be defenseless victims when his predictable rage explodes.
The local gangs who terrorize an urban manufacturing district raise the costs of insurance and security services so high that employers flee the area, increasing already horrific unemployment statistics in such neighborhoods, leaving the local residents ever more desperate and unemployable.
This is the reality. We see it in nearly every substantial city in the country, and it only gets worse from year to year.
The prosecutors bought and paid for by George Soros… the toothless police emasculated by their own mayors and city councils… the gun control orders signed by a corrupt, mindless Delaware relic and the feel-good liberal policies of vapid voters, fulfilling their fantasies of a utopian society with no resemblance whatsoever to the real world.
We knew it was coming. With every election it becomes clearer: The modern Democratic party is the proud ally of the criminal element, and the clear enemy of the law abiding citizen.
Why are your auto and home insurance policy premiums higher in Democratic counties than in Republican counties? Why are there more jobs in areas that control crime than there are in areas that encourage crime? And why have America’s enemies so long sponsored the political careers of the corrupt politicians who put us in this story state?
You know.
We all know.
Fifty years ago, perhaps, or maybe seventy-five or a hundred years ago, one could make the case that soft-on-crime measures might be worth trying. Such measures were then advocated by decent, well-meaning people, however misguided.
But no longer. People who support Democrat crime policy today are people who support rampant crime. There is simply no other way to look at it anymore.
The data is in, and it is overwhelming.
Copyright 2023 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, and former president of the Ethnic American Council, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
He can be seen through Saturday, March 18 as Harry the Horse, in the Gaslight Players’ production of Frank Loesser’s musical comedy, “Guys and Dolls,” at St. Stephen’s Church in Des Plaines, Illinois.
