A report by Fox News claims President Joe Biden’s push for gun control as part of the solution to surging crime is detrimental to the Democrat effort to hold Congress in 2022.
Fox News claims the gun control-laden response to crime could be even more detrimental, when seen in combination with the efforts to hamper police around the country:
Biden’s focus on gun crimes could provide fodder for Second Amendment advocates who have accused him of attacking legal gun ownership and for Republican lawmakers who have argued that Democratic calls to “defund the police” are most responsible for the crime wave. GOP strategists employed that tactic to great effect in down-ballot races during the 2020 election cycle.
The outlet quotes Republican strategist Whit Ayers saying, “One of the most potent criticisms over the last 40 years of Democrats is that they’re soft on crime and reluctant to crack down on crime. This surge and the forces on the far-left talking about defunding the police feed into the suspicious that Democrats are simply not serious about combating crime.”
The Democrats have long sought to overcome the way they are perceived with regards to fighting crime.
On September 14, 2014, Breitbart News pointed to the New York Times’ special report marking the 20th anniversary of the federal “assault weapons” ban. NYT claimed that the ban, which was in place 1994 to 2004, was the outgrowth of Democrat efforts to look tough on crime; these efforts entailed demonizing an entire category of guns, then banning them to give off the aura of fighting crime.
According to the NYT, America was “suffering from a spike in gun crime…in the early 1990s” so “Democrats created and banned [an entire] category of guns.”
The NYT article is titled, “The Assault Weapon Myth.”
Democrats lost control of Congress after passing the “assault weapons” ban. Fox News is suggesting the current control push could achieve the same result.
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.