From Joe Biden’s speech on crime yesterday:
And we discussed a comprehensive strategy that I’m releasing today to combat the epidemic of gun violence and other violent crime that we’ve been seeing in our country for far too long, that has spiked since the start of the pandemic over a year ago.
Crime has — historically rises during the summer. And as we emerge from this pandemic with the country opening back up again, the traditional summer’s — summer spike may even be more pronounced than it usually would be.
For folks at home, here’s what you need to know: I’ve been at this a long time and there are things we know that work that reduce gun violence and violent crime, and things that we don’t know about. But things we know about: Background checks for purchasing a firearm are important; a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines — no one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something; community policing and programs that keep neighborhoods safe and keep folks out of trouble.
In other words, gun murders went way up recently, but we’re not going to do anything to deal with the causes of the recent surge in murders. Instead, we are just going to use the big rise in mayhem over the last 13 months to do what we’ve always wanted to do to crack down on weapons popular with Republicans that haven’t played a role in the murder surge, rather than do anything relevant to try to get murder rates at least back down to the 2019 level. To figure out what we did wrong in 2020 so we can cut murders back to the 2019 level, we’d have to have an honest conversation about the Racial Reckoning, and nobody this room, officials and media, wants that.
