Biden’s focus on semiautomatic weapons is ignorance manifest

The hallmark of the Joe Biden presidency is ignorance, the hallmark of the gun-policy debate is ignorance, and so when President Biden weighs in on firearms — as with his recent insistence that the United States should categorically prohibit semiautomatic weapons — the result is ignorance squared.

President Biden has been in public office as long as I have been alive, and he was elected to the Senate in 1972, when the violent-crime rate in the United States was on its way toward quadrupling from its relatively modest 1960 level to its ghastly peak in 1991. You would think that Biden would have at some point in those five decades learned a little something about guns and crime — but he has not.

Biden, like many Democrats, speaks about semiautomatic firearms — a category that includes nearly all of the handguns currently sold and the great majority of the rifles — as though the presence of such weapons in civilian hands were something new. Nothing could be further from the truth: Semiautomatic handguns have been for sale in the civilian market since the late 19^th-century, and by the early 20^th century, Colt was selling tens of thousands of its popular semiautomatic handgun — known as the 1911, after the year of its introduction — to civilians, as well as exporting them to Canada and other countries. Semiautomatic rifles weren’t far behind, with Winchester offering its first in 1903 and Remington in 1905. These were firearms explicitly designed for the civilian market—the first military-use semiautomatic rifle wouldn’t come into use until a few years later. The AR-15 was first sold to civilians in the early 1960s and was advertised as a hunting rifle.

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