The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) reacted to President-elect Joe Biden’s pledge to “defeat the NRA” by suggesting his real target is “every gun owner.”
Breitbart News reported Biden’s weekend pledge to go after the NRA, noting his decades-old support for gun control, including bans on certain categories of firearms.
SAF’s release points to Biden’s past gun control support and current gun control pledges to suggest his real target is not limited to one gun right’s group, but to every American who owns a gun.
SAF founder and executive vice president Alan Gottlieb said, “Joe Biden isn’t fooling anybody. He spent 47 years on Capitol Hill trying to turn the right to keep and bear arms into a regulated privilege. Now that he’s headed to the White House, he thinks he will be able to complete his mission.”
Gottlieb added, “Biden has labored relentlessly for decades to reduce the Second Amendment to rubble. He may attack one group by name, but his goal is to crush the rights of every gun owner in our country.”
Biden’s campaign for the presidency included numerous gun control pledges, including one that would bring AR-15s and similar commonly-owned semiautomatic rifles under the purview of the National Firearms Act (NFA), which could result in a $200 tax on each such rifle which is already privately owned in America. And Biden wants to do the same thing with “high capacity” magazines.
An estimated 20 million rifles would targeted in Biden’s plan, as would approximately 150 million ammunition magazines. The taxes on these items alone could amount to $34 billion. And that is $34 billion that would be required of gun owners, rather than a specific gun rights organization.
Additionally, Biden wants universal background checks, an end to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, and he supports a national buyback of certain firearms. These three moves alone would result in criminalizing private gun sales for all Americans, removing gun manufacturers’ protection from frivolous lawsuits, and require Americans of all walks of life to surrender certain of their firearms over to the government.
It is with these things in mind that SAF suggests Biden is really targeting “the rights of every gun owner.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.