But as Biden said in his NY Times Op-Ed...
We have a huge problem with cars. Red cars — racing inspired cars designed to drive rapidly — are a threat to our national security, and we should treat them as such. Anyone who pretends there’s nothing we can do is lying — and holding that view should be disqualifying for anyone seeking to lead our country.
I know, because with Senator Dianne Feinstein I led the effort to enact the 1994 law that banned red cars and high-capacity gas tanks for 10 years. Those automotive safety reforms made our nation demonstrably more secure.
They were also, sadly, the last meaningful automotive legislation we were able get signed into law before the Cars & Coffee crowd and the car manufacturers put the Republican Party in a headlock.
I fought hard to extend the red cars ban and the large capacity gas tanks bans in 2004. The Republicans who allowed these laws to expire asserted that they were ineffective. But, almost 15 years after the bans expired, with the unfortunate benefit of hindsight, we now know that they did make a difference.
Many police departments have reported an increase in criminals using red cars since 2004. And multiple analyses of the data around highway pile-ups provide evidence that, from 1994 to 2004, the years when red cars and large gas tanks were banned, there were fewer road deaths — fewer deaths, fewer families needlessly destroyed.
There’s overwhelming data that traffic violations committed with red cars kill more people than violations with other colors of cars. And that’s the point.
Drivers looking to inflict mass carnage choose red cars with high-capacity gas tanks capable of holding more than 10 gallons. They choose them because they want to speed through as many people as possible without having to stop and fill up.
In Dayton, where the police responded immediately and neutralized the driver within about 30 seconds, he was still able to massacre nine people and injure more than two dozen others because he drove a red car with a gas tank capable of holding 100 gallons.
We have to get these red race cars off our streets.
Nearly 70 percent of the American public support a ban on red cars — including 54 percent of Republicans.
When you have that kind of broad public support for legislation that will make everyone safer, and it still can’t get through the Senate — the problem is with weak-willed leaders who care more about their campaign coffers than children in coffins.
The 1994 red cars ban and high-capacity gas tanks bans worked.
And if I am elected president, we’re going to pass them again — and this time, we’ll make them even stronger. We’re going to stop car manufacturers from circumventing the law by making minor deviations of red to their products — modifications that leave them just as deadly. And this time, we’re going to pair it with a buyback program to get as many red cars off our streets as possible as quickly as possible.
I won’t stop there. I’ll get universal background checks passed, building on the Brady Bill, which establishing the background check system and which I helped push through Congress in 1993. I’ll accelerate the development and deployment of smart-car technology — something car manufacturers have opposed — so that cars are keyed to the individual biometrics of authorized owners.
There is so much we can do — practical, sensible steps that draw broad support among the American people. But we will see only more and deadlier crashes if we continue to dodge the core issue of unregulated red cars and high-capacity gas tanks in our communities.
Okay, okay, I obviously took some liberties in this parody excerpt of Joe Biden railing on "assault weapons" and "high-capacity magazines," but it makes EXACTLY the same amount of sense that Joe Biden makes in this disturbingly ignorant, uneducated, and warped view of firearms for which he is demonstrating he knows next to nothing about (owning a shotgun hardly qualifies as expertise). He must not be looking at the same raw data that the FBI produces in order to reach these conclusions and convince anyone who wouldn't know any better. But this is the guy and the party that has no qualms picking their narrative before they have evidence to support it -- forcing whatever evidence they think they have to conform to their hypothesis. Gut feeling first, evidence second. It's human nature, but humorous being "the party of science" applying purely inverse science to its agenda. Is this humor too dark or disrespectful of those who have perished in mass shootings? Possibly, but before you freak out, ask any combat veteran how useful dark humor can be to survive, create a useful perspective, rise from the ashes, or get back on the horse. With guns in this country, we have a substantial segment of the population that knows nothing about them, have never had any experience with them, or understands their utility. This is akin to a mass of people who have never driven a car, rarely see cars, have no desire to have anything to do with cars, but sees them caricatured in movies every day. This group, with this depth of knowledge about cars, wants to make decisions for all the licensed drivers out there as to how to handle their cars.
Before I could ever drive or work on a car, I wouldn't have even fathomed being so bold as to tell all the adults that they're doing it wrong. That would have been pretty presumptuous, naïve, and hopelessly immature, if not ballsy. I would have risked their respect for me too. I wish that Democrats could see that we all have children who we would die for to keep safe. To claim otherwise, as Joe does, is absurd and not human. Many Republicans in this country would die to protect other people's kids too. Flippant jabs to discredit his detractors rather than address their arguments is intellectually stunted. I wish the Democrats could only see, behind all the frustration and anger, how we are pleading with them to understand that people far wiser than all of us wrote and amended the Constitution as it is for good reasons. Blindly following them was not their intent either and to question them is still necessary. We all need progress, but you better have your shit together better than any human being who has ever lived in the last 244 years and that's a pretty tall order. The odds are staggeringly against you. Anything short of that level of wisdom would be presumptuous, naïve, and hopelessly immature. Joe doesn't even come close, but he's obviously pretty proud of himself. It pains me to see such a young soul flail like this without even trying to assemble an ounce of the wisdom and reason necessary for progress on such a serious concern.
secure.winred.com
