We’ve spent a good deal of time in recent columns in this space on the fact that we are governed by people who suck, and that’s likely to continue. It has to, because being governed by people who suck is a deeply impactful experience for everyone — whether you would like to be impacted or not.
The only escape from being governed by people who suck, when the sucktastic people are in charge, is a change in geography. That accounts for the amazing growth of the American suburbs in the last three-quarters of a century.
But the people who most profoundly suck in government are now in control of Washington, and this is a problem for everyone. It isn’t so easy to make an escape from the good old US of A. Certainly not as easy as trading in Dallas for Plano or Philly for Bucks County. Trading America for Belize comes with sacrifices most of us would prefer not to make.
So we’ll have to try to ride it out. But every time Joe Biden, who is determined to make every last one of us recognize the magnitude of how prodigiously he sucks, makes a feint at governance the riding-out gets a little more painful.
And perhaps comical. Because in the same week Biden promulgated a handful of executive orders seeking to curtail gun ownership, his drug-addled son Hunter released an embarrassing “tell-some” book, which left conspicuously undiscussed his own illegal activity involving firearms — and people did notice.
The Washington Examiner put Hunter in a meat grinder over the omissions:
Members of the Secret Service attempted to retrieve gun paperwork from a Wilmington, Delaware, gun store in October 2018 after a firearm owned by Hunter Biden went missing, according to a Politico article in March — another incident not mentioned in Hunter’s memoir. According to a police document, Hallie Biden took the .38-caliber revolver and placed it in a public trash can near Janssen’s Market in Wilmington. Hunter Biden instructed her to go retrieve it, but it was no longer in the trash. Local police were notified, and the gun was soon recovered.
Secret Service agents allegedly asked the owner of the gun store to hand over the paperwork related to the sale. Politico reported that Ron Palmieri, the owner of StarQuest Shooters and Survival Supply, refused. The Secret Service said it had no involvement in this.
“No idea,” Hunter Biden said during an interview on CBS This Morning when asked if he knew anything about the Secret Service involvement. “I don’t know whether the Secret Service were or why they would be — I don’t think that that’s true, to my knowledge.”
That contradicts reported texts by the president’s son from January 2019, which the New York Post said it obtained, in which he mentions Secret Service involvement.
In addition to the police report, Politico obtained copies of the Firearms Transaction Record dated Oct. 12, 2018. Hunter Biden responded “no” to a question asking if he was an illegal drug user, with his response coming five years after he was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. His memoir discusses his drug addiction at great length, and lying on the form is a felony.
The Bidens are open abusers of the rights enumerated in the Second Amendment. Joe Biden famously went public with some fabulously idiotic home-defense advice involving a shotgun several years ago, after all:
“If you wanna protect yourself, get a double-barrel shotgun, have the shells of 12-gauge shotgun and I promise you, as I told my wife — we live in an area that’s wooded and somewhat secluded — I said Jill, if there’s ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here or walk out, put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house,” Biden said during a question and answer session with Parents Magazine on proposals from former President Barack Obama’s administration to lower gun violence.
Between the mortal threat to our feathered friends and various tree-dwelling rodents and the robustly useless advice contained in that utterance, it’s clear that Joe Biden sucks on the gun issue. That his son is a perfect exemplar of the ineffectiveness of federal gun laws in preventing nefarious characters from getting their hands on a firearm did not seem to faze him a bit on Thursday. Hunter simply lied and said he wasn’t a drug addict (and the dealer never bothered to check him for “meth mouth“). And the mass shooters in both Atlanta and Boulder in recent weeks bought weapons quite legally, despite the Boulder shooter being on an FBI watch list.
It’s comical, or it would be were it not such a descent into the suck.
Little of what Biden blabbered in his press conference Thursday will amount to effective policy in reducing gun violence. He’s trying to limit the sale of pistol braces, which allow shooters to fire more accurately. The vast majority of people wishing to use a pistol to commit violence against their fellow man aren’t going to use a pistol brace; that’s a completely worthless bit of policy that had already descended into idiocy back in December.
He’s going after “ghost guns,” which if you’ve never heard of them are makeshift weapons that can be assembled at home. If a “ghost gun” was even mildly functional lots of people would have one; it isn’t, and they don’t, and we’ve already seen the attempts to ban “ghost guns” devolve into dysfunction when they were tried in California.
Biden is appointing David Chipman, a gun control crusader who was a case agent following the horror at Waco (and who recently lied about the events there), as the new head of the ATF, something that will make for a rollicking Senate confirmation hearing.
He also wants the Department of Justice to prepare model “red flag” legislation, which will die in the Senate. And he’s asking DOJ to outline investments in “community violence interventions” and to publish an annual report on firearms trafficking.
None of which seems to offer much of a solution to what Biden says is an “epidemic” and an international embarrassment.”
Honestly, Joe, this column agrees there’s an international embarrassment. But it isn’t gun violence. It’s our epidemic of incompetent leadership, which is noteworthy across the globe.
This man doesn’t really think he can put a stop to gun violence. He can’t even put a stop to the depredations of his own son. The best he can do is to keep Hunter from spilling the beans on the Biden pay-for-play scams in his autobiography.
