Tucker: Biden's pick to head ATF is an 'unhinged' man
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host says 'nothing the Democratic party advocates for is more dishonest than gun control'
Nothing the Democratic Party advocates for is more dishonest than gun control. Everything about that specific issue is false. Most policy debates aren’t like that, and we try to be honest about it. No matter how passionate you are about a position, you can still sort of see what the other side is talking about.
You might deeply dislike taxes, for example, but you can still acknowledge it’s fair to charge people for the services they receive from government. The other side isn’t crazy, they’ve just arrived at a different number than you did. You can hate abortion (and we do) and still understand (again, if you’re being totally honest about it) why a scared pregnant teenager might be tempted to have one.
Gun control is not like that. Gun control is entirely fraudulent. The Democratic Party claims that guns cause violence. That's the core claim, and it is a lie. It’s provably untrue. The places in this country that have the most guns and the loosest controls on those guns also have the least gun violence and the fewest killings. That's the bottom line. You could look it up; the statistics are available to anyone.
Anyone who tries to restrict your legally owned firearms is not trying to make America safer. The point is to disarm you and strip you of your autonomy, your power, your right to self-defense. Gun control is not about guns. Gun control is about who controls America. Is it the population, as in a democracy, or does all control go to a small group of authoritarians, as in an oligarchy? Those are the stakes in the gun control debate. It's not about guns, it's about who runs the country.
With that in mind, Joe Biden's speech Thursday calling for more gun control should make you uncomfortable. Almost nothing the president said was true. For example, he claimed that firearms purchased at gun shows are exempt from background checks. That's a lie, as anyone who's ever been to a gun show can tell you. Biden also claimed that gun manufacturers have total immunity against lawsuits. That's also a lie. Gun manufacturers get sued all the time, just ask them. And so on. It was a speech aimed to mislead rather than to inform. Before he announced how he plans to restrict your Second Amendment rights, Joe Biden wanted to remind you that those rights are not real in the first place. They are not, as he put it, "absolute."
BIDEN: Nothing I'm about to recommend in any way impinges on the Second Amendment. There are phony arguments suggesting that these are Second Amendment rights at stake, for what we're talking about. But no amendment, no amendment to the Constitution is absolute.
(By the way, if you watched the speech live, you heard the sirens in the background responding to the skyrocketing crime rate in the city Biden presides over.)
The right to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed," the Constitution promised. But according to Joe Biden, that’s not an absolute right, despite what the text says. No, that right is subject to his approval and his interpretation. Joe Biden is in charge of the Constitution now. Joe Biden defines its terms and Joe Biden has decided that something called "stabilizing braces" can no longer be allowed.
Now, a stabilizing brace is used by target shooters to hold heavy firearms. They play zero role in the murder epidemic now underway in our cities. So why is Joe Biden banning them without the approval of Congress? Probably because up to 40 million law-abiding Americans own this device. Under Biden’s order, every one of those people will have to alert federal authorities and pay hundreds of dollars in fines for the crime of owning a harmless piece of plastic that was legal yesterday. If they don't comply, Joe Biden’s federal authorities can drag them off in handcuffs, seize their property, and charge them with a felony.
So with a single stroke of a pen, Joe Biden just turned tens of millions of overwhelmingly Republican voters into criminals. Is it starting to make sense now? Think about that for a minute and you'll begin to understand why the Democratic Party is so focused on what they call "weapons of war." You might know them as semiautomatic, small-caliber sporting rifles that normal people use for hunting and target shooting and home defense.
Here's the thing: No subject is more carefully cataloged than gun violence. Guns like these so-called "weapons of war" play no meaningful role in crime. Virtually all gun murders in this country are committed with handguns (again, don't take our word for it, you can look this up). A small number of people are responsible for most of the violence and they use a small variety of weapons to commit it (again, you can look this up). Those weapons are not rifles.
Here are the numbers: According to the most recent data from the FBI, firearms were involved in a total of 10,258 homicides in 2019, the last year for which data is available. Fewer than 500 out of more than 10,000 of those homicides were committed with rifles, including so-called weapons of war. So criminals don't use rifles. They're not concealable. Maybe that's why, in fact, more people were murdered with knives than with rifles.
So if you actually cared about making the country safer and keeping people from getting murdered, you would target handguns in big cities. That's where the murders are. That's where the violence is. But the Biden administration is doing the opposite of this, the mirror image of this. The Biden administration is letting big city criminals go. People who use guns for violence are walking out of jail. And instead, the Biden administration is using the full force of government to disarm peaceful voters in zip codes that voted for Donald Trump. It is that simple.
Thursday, Biden announced that he wants to ban what he called "assault weapons." He was speaking about the AR 15, the single most popular sporting rifle in America. So the question is: If we banned so-called assault weapons, would the country become safer? We don't need to guess about the answer because we tried this before under Bill Clinton. For ten full years, we banned assault rifles and then, by law, the Department of Justice studied the effects. Once that ban expired in 2004, gun homicides fell in almost every major city (again, you can look this up). So policies like this one are unhinged from reality, to put it gently.
Luckily, to enforce them. Joe Biden nominated a man who is unhinged from reality. His name is David Chipman, and he will now run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), an agency that Joe Biden referred to Thursay as the "AFT"
BIDEN: Today I'm proud to nominate David Chipman to serve as a director of the AFT. David knows AFT well.
BIDEN ATF PICK CHIPMAN ALARMS GUN RIGHTS GROUPS
"David knows AFT well." Hilarious. If you’re Joe Biden, everything’s a teacher’s union.
So who is this David Chipman? He’s a conspiracy nut, for one thing.
In a recent Internet post, he claimed that the Branch Davidians shot down helicopters during the Waco siege in 1993. They didn’t. No one aboard a federal helicopter was shot or injured that day. The helicopters also didn’t crash. That’s a bizarre claim coming someone who was directly involved in the case, as Chipman was. But it’s worse than that. In the spring of 1993, the ATF killed dozens of innocent children and at least one pregnant woman for no obvious reason. It’s one of the worst things federal agents have done in this country.
If you’re taking over the ATF, maybe you could apologize for that. But no. David Chipman lied about it, and attacked the dead. It was like blaming the Japanese for their own internment, or attacking the victims of the Tuskegee Experiment for getting syphilis. Not evidence of a generous spirit, evidence of a zeal. This is the man Joe Biden just nominated to lead the ATF.
But it gets worse. In a Reddit post, David Chipman suggested that people who fail background checks should be arrested on the spot.
While at ATF, I conducted studies involving people who failed background checks to determine how many later committed crimes with a gun—many did," he wrote. "This is a perfect opportunity to arrest people before committing crimes rather than responding after the fact."
"Arrest people before committing crimes." That’s a new concept in American law, though the Chinese are highly familiar with it.
However, it does raise a point of pressing interest to the Biden family. Joe Biden just appointed a guy who thinks people who lie on federal firearms background checks should go to prison. Do you know any people like that? Hunter Biden purchased a handgun illegally. He lied on a federal background check. (That's not speculation. He did. We've seen the form.) So the question is, will David Chipman arrest the president's son? And if he doesn't arrest the president's son, the question is: How exactly are you obligated to follow these rules?
WHO IS BIDEN ATF NOMINEE DAVID CHIPMAN?
That's a serious question. Can you live in a country where the rules don't apply to the president's son, but you could go to jail for violating them? How can you participate in a system like that?
We should note that David Chipman has said a lot of other things on the internet that he doesn't want you to see. He's locked his Twitter account so no one can read what he's written. But the Daily Wire found an archived version of David Chipman's Twitter page, and compared it to his current page. They found he's deleted at least 1,000 tweets in recent days.
We can only speculate what David Chipman said in those posts. But we do know that what he's said publicly tells us all we need to know about why Joe Biden selected him. In October 2018, for example, David Chipman told The Hill that AR-15's should be treated "just like machine guns" -- meaning banned. Chipman made that remark in his capacity as a policy adviser for an anti-gun group. In 2012, he suggested on MSNBC that the Secret Service shouldn't carry firearms. And last year, David Chipman openly mocked the millions of Americans who are buying guns to protect their families from the crime wave Chipman’s party started:
CHIPMAN: They might think that they’re Die Hard, ready to go, but unfortunately they’re more like Tiger King and they’re putting themselves and their family in danger, and so what I would suggest is to those first-time gun owners – I would secure that gun locked and unloaded and hide it behind the cans of tuna and beef jerky stored in a cabinet and only bring that out if the zombies start to appear and I don’t think they are.
It's hard to imagine a flippant or more infuriating remark. If you bought a gun to protect your family, your business or your home during the riots that these people unleashed on the country, the conspiracy nut running the ATF calls you crazy. That's why, if you made the mistake of buying a handgun with a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds -- in other words, if you bought a Glock 19 or any of the most popular handguns sold in America -- you'll be obligated to surrender it to that guy.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM, PBS HOST, 2019: And high-capacity means — what kind of numbers are we talking about?
CHIPMAN: Yes. I think the consensus has been around 10. And there are a number of reasons why.
BRANGHAM: So, 10 and above would be high?
CHIPMAN: Yes. Well, I think -- let's say 10 and below are OK or reasonable. Above would be regulated.
So this raises a lot of questions: Why is David Chipman allowed to decide how many rounds you're allowed in your magazine? What does he know about that? Is he in charge of protecting your family? Does he live in your neighborhood? Are your children his responsibility? It's outrageous. But worse than that is, it's theater. It's not real. People like David Chipman aren't opposed to gun violence. In fact, people like David Chipman, his party, certainly are making gun violence possible in this country.
We can give you many examples, but here's just one from Washington D.C.: The city is planning to stop enforcing gun laws. The party that thinks guns cause violence is no longer pulling them off the street. Why? Because it's racially insensitive to do so. A D.C. police commander called John Haines just sent a memo announcing this policy: "No longer are we focused on getting guns." What aren't they telling us out of the other side of their mouth? That your guns are their problem. Your guns, not the criminals' guns, your guns, because you're the criminal now.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, where a 21-month-old child was just shot in a road rage incident last month, Mayor Lori Lightfoot has also decided that not all guns need to be removed from the streets. According to her, the real danger isn't handguns. It's "military-grade weapons" from Indiana:
LIGHTFOOT, APRIL 7: You can go over the border in Indiana and literally buy military-grade weapons at any quantity.
ILLINOIS GOVERNOR, CHICAGO MAYOR BOOED AT WHITE SOX HOME OPENER
That statement is a shocking lie, and Chicago's own data proves it. Most violent crimes in Illinois were committed with guns purchased in the state. According to Chicago police, from 2018 to 2019, authorities encountered a grand total of four people armed with rifles. Four. That's it. That's what Lori Lightfoot is focused on.
In that same period, authorities encountered 44 people armed with revolvers, 15 people armed with "chemical weapons" (whatever that is), and 32 people "wielding their feet" in a violent manner. The rest, of course, were semiautomatic handguns That's what all the murders are committed with, and everyone knows it. Rifles are not a real threat in Chicago, and they haven't been for a long time, if ever.
Between 2013 and 2016, just 4.8% of guns recovered by Chicago police were rifles. The most recent murder report from Chicago was from all the way back in 2011 (they're a little slow on the numbers there), but according to that report, just one rifle was used in a homicide in the city of Chicago, one. That's what they want to take away. Why? Because you own it, not the criminals.
In the decade that followed, a George Soros-funded state's attorney named Kim Foxx took over in Chicago. During her tenure, prosecutors started dropping cases for serious gun gun crimes. Not accidentally, but as a matter of policy. Aggravated battery with a firearm, unlawful use of a weapon, reckless discharge of a firearm, serious crimes involving guns. They dropped the charges. They're not worried about gun crime. They're worried about you protecting yourself, and not just in Chicago.
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Across the country, criminals who commit violence with guns are going free. Murder rates are hitting record levels. Meanwhile, you haven't hurt anyone. You haven't done anything wrong. But suddenly, Hunter Biden has a fat book contract from Simon & Schuster, and you're a felon for trying to defend your home. You can see what's going on here.
Again, they're not trying to control guns. They're trying to control you.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening monologue on the April 8, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."