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Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Joe Biden scares the crap out of gun freaks

Talking Points Memo:

Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported the gun violence task force led by Vice President Biden is considering gun legislation “far broader and more comprehensive…than simply reinstating an expired ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition.”

News that the White House is considering significant gun control legislation in the wake of the Newtown, Conn. elementary school shooting is music to the ears of gun control advocates, who have waited decades for a serious conversation about guns. But it’s also being welcomed by gun rights groups, who say leaks from the Biden task force are just the thing to push their flock back into the fight.

“[The article] was a Molotov cocktail right into the middle of this thing,” Dave Workman, a former board member at the National Rifle Association, told TPM Monday. “That lit the fuse, it really did.”

Biden has “galvanized the gun community,” Workman said. Though no longer on the NRA board, Workman still spends most of his time advocating for expanded gun rights. He’s an official with the Second Amendment Foundation, communications director for Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and a prolific writer on the gun rights. Both groups Workman serves on are sponsors of Gun Appreciation Day, a nationwide effort to highlight gun ownership scheduled for the weekend of President Obama’s second inauguration.

“They’re talking about banning millions of firearms,” Workman told TPM. “The writing was on the wall when Joe Biden was put on that thing because he’s a gun grabber.”

While it’s good to see the gun nuts worried, it pays to point out that these are people who seem to lack any sense of perspective when it comes to danger. You don’t argue that you need to be able to take any kind of gun with you anywhere you want if you’ve got a sense of what threats might realistically exist out there. Gun nuts are gun nuts because their initial reaction to pretty much anything seems to be blind, animal panic.

So it may be that Biden’s not as much of a threat to their cause as they might think. Wait until the final package is out before you get your hopes — or terrors — up.

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