THE NRA FLUNKS CIVICS

This is good:

Calling them "basic common sense," President Joe Biden took steps Monday to rein in the use of untraceable firearms known as ghost guns that law enforcement officers said turn up frequently at crime scenes.

Biden announced federal regulations that will target privately made firearms that can be assembled from do-it-yourself kits purchased online or in a store. The weapons lack serial numbers, which makes it difficult to trace the owner....

The rules ... will clarify that the unfinished parts sold in the gun kits, such as the frame of a handgun or the receiver of a long gun, will qualify as firearms under federal law.

Commercial manufacturers of the kits will have to be licensed and must add serial numbers on the kits’ frame or receiver. Commercial sellers of the kits will have to become licensed and will be required to run background checks on potential buyers before a sale, just like they must do with commercially made firearms.

The National Rifle Association -- out of an awareness that what Biden is doing probably makes a lot of sense to the vast majority of Americans, including many gun owners -- responded by changing the subject:

"An administration that’s truly sincere and resolute about curbing violent crime rates would do one thing: take violent criminals off the streets immediately," the NRA’s managing director of public affairs Andrew Arulanandam told Fox News Digital on Monday. "Yet, the Biden administration allows these criminals who kill and maim with callous and reckless abandon, again and again, to roam the streets of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and other cities large and small across our country without fear of prosecution and punishment."

What the NRA’s managing director of public affairs seems not to understand is that it's not the job of the federal government to bring ordinary street criminals to justice. The Biden administration hasn't failed at this because it's actually the job of local law enforcement. It's called federalism, boys. You should learn about it, since you think you're so darn patriotic.

The NRA, of course, doesn't care whether its attack today made any sense. It was meant to make supporters feel smug and superior, like literally every public communication from the gun lobby.

The NRA wants to suggest that the federal government under a Democratic president is responsible for crime in cities with Democratic mayors. Of course, as a recent report by the centrist group Third Way told us,

murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors. For example, Jacksonville, a city with a Republican mayor, had 128 more murders in 2020 than San Francisco, a city with a Democrat mayor, despite their comparable populations. In fact, the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.

... murder rates are, on average, 40% higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts. And finally, many of the states with the worst murder rates—like Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas—are ones that few would describe as urban. Only 2 of America’s top 100 cities in population are located in these high murder rate states. And not a single one of the top 10 murder states registers in the top 15 for population density.

But what the NRA Said today feels right to conservatives, and that's all that matters.