In the past, we’ve seen a couple of politicians get themselves out of some hot water by declaring an intention to focus on pushing gun control.
They make the announcement and the controversy around them seems to evaporate almost overnight.
That doesn’t work so much for President Joe Biden.
After all, this isn’t exactly a new push from him.
However, that isn’t going to stop his campaign co-chair from trying to use the tactic to deflect questions about his age.
President Biden‘s 2024 campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond pivoted to talk about gun control when asked Sunday about the 80-year-old president’s age presenting challenges at the ballot box.
“While they continue to talk about age, we’ll continue to talk about the fact that they’re not talking about banning assault weapons, while they’re banning books but they’re not protecting our children in schools,” Mr. Richmond said on ABC’s “This Week.” “The fact that none of them raised their hand to talk about climate as a real issue when we see fires in Maui, we see hurricanes hitting California, we see the destruction of wildfires. But they’re not talking about that.”
So, as you can see, it’s not just gun control that Richmond tried to invoke to stave off criticism that Biden might just be too old to do the job.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that so-called assault weapons is something very different than the president’s age.
A new assault weapon ban isn’t really going to happen, in part because enough people understand that the issue with mass shootings isn’t because of AR-15s but with people who seem to think killing people wholesale sounds like a swell time.
In contrast, the books being “banned,” in many cases actually aren’t being banned, they’re simply being removed from curriculums or, if they are being removed, there’s a good reason. I’ve seen pages from a couple of notable examples that were pretty sexually explicit, after all.
Meanwhile, we have a president who can barely piece together two coherent sentences as a general rule, who seemingly falls asleep during important events, and who can’t seem to remember that his one son died of cancer rather than being killed in Iraq.
Granted, that last may just be a case of lying, but I’m not sure that makes anything better.
Bringing up his age is certainly valid, and even 69 percent of Democrats think he’s too old.
So why try to pivot to gun control? Because, frankly, that’s all the Biden campaign has at this point. They need to deflect from the very real concern over Biden’s mental faculties. When more than two-thirds of his own party think he’s too old to do the job, there’s a huge problem and they know it.
But they’re hoping the media will focus on the gun control angle instead because it worked with former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and his blackface controversy and with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his brownface controversy.
Both declared they would push for gun control and all was forgiven.
With Biden, though, there’s no reason to think he can step up any anti-gun efforts, that he could get them through Congress even if he did, or that with his age being what it is, he’d remember anyway.
That doesn’t mean the media won’t try, but they won’t make those concerns disappear by pretending they don’t exist.
