One of the most infamous gun control duos in the nation’s history is teaming up again as former president Barack Obama endorsed his former vice-president Joe Biden in the 2020 contest for the White House.
Biden will ever be remembered for dubiously encouraging Americans to fire their shotguns indiscriminately into the air to ward off potential intruders.
Obama, meanwhile, once brazenly wielded a finger gun at Americans in a public photo-shoot, the same gesture that resulted in untold numbers of harmless students being kicked out of or otherwise disciplined at school during his two terms as president.
But these high jinks aside, there was nothing funny about the real damage the two did and tried to do to the Second Amendment rights of Americans while they occupied the White House.
For example, the two presided over Operation Fast & Furious, a supposed investigatory effort in which federal agents encouraged fully functional firearms to be sold to Mexican narco-terrorists, who then used them to kill, even as the administration cited violence in Mexico to call for gun control in the U.S.
Their tenure also gave us Operation Choke Point, a supposed enforcement action by federal banking regulators against fraudulent, high risk, and illegal enterprises. This effort, which sought to choke off access to financial services, additionally went after legitimate but politically disfavored business sectors, including the firearm and ammunition industries.
Then, of course, there was the attempt to use executive action to ban one of the most popular types of ammunition for the most popular centerfire rifle in America, an effort that met tremendous backlash from America’s gun owners and culminated in the resignation of Obama’s ATF director.
And who can forget how the Obama/Biden administration sought to use Social Security disability benefits as a means of depriving tens of thousands of Americans every year of their lawfully obtained firearms?
As bad as those years were for gun owners, they would have been much, much worse if Obama/Biden had succeeded in other planned anti-gun schemes, including banning and confiscating most modern semiautomatic rifles and making private transfers of firearms a federal crime.
Only the vigilant activism of NRA members and other freedom-loving Americans kept them from realizing their most ambitious and sweeping gun control objectives. Indeed, Obama himself would later go on record claiming that his inability to enact federal gun control was the issue that left him “most frustrated” as president.
But now Obama hopes that his former vice president will succeed where he did not. Indeed, Biden is openly touting a gun control agenda in his White House bid that is far more ambitious and sweeping than what the Obama administration would publicly admit it supported. This reflects the increasing radicalization of the Democrat Party, a party whose most extreme elements even attack Obama himself for his supposed willingness to comprise on far left ideals.
“Choosing Joe to be my vice-president was one of the best decisions I ever made,” Obama said in announcing his endorsement. To the degree that’s true, however, it is more indicative of Obama’s own long history of bad decision-making than of Biden’s merits and abilities as a national leader.
And the years since Obama made that decision have not been kind to Biden, with the deterioration of his judgment and mental faculties a frequent subject of public comment, including by leftist partisans and non-partisans alike.
But make no mistake, Biden remains aware and alert enough to pose a very real danger to America’s gun owners, should he be elected.
In that regard, at least, he would no doubt do justice to the confidence of his former boss in the White House.