President Joe Biden is working to enact gun legislation to further limit gun access in America, calling gun violence in America “an international embarrassment.”
“Nothing I’m about to recommend in any way impinges on the Second Amendment,” Biden said. “They’re phony arguments suggesting these are Second Amendment rights at stake with what we’re talking about. But no amendment, no amendment to the Constitution is absolute.”
He continued, “So the idea is just bizarre to suggest that some of the things we’re recommending are contrary to the Constitution. Gun violence in this country is an epidemic. And it’s an international embarrassment.”
Biden, a longtime gun-control proponent, issued executive orders and directives to agencies. Among his efforts will be to prohibit selling of an arm brace that is used to make firing a gun more accurate. He is banning “ghost guns,” which are untraceable guns made of various parts that can be obtained from different sources and the part don’t require a background check.
Homemade “ghost guns,” are untraceable, as they lack serial numbers. Hobbyists who like to build their own guns are growing in numbers.
[Read the White House fact sheet at this link.]
But whether those federal mandates can override Alaska statute will be a question for the Alaska Legislature and the governor of Alaska. In 2013, the Legislature passed HB 69, to protect Alaskans’ rights to keep and bear arms.The law, sponsored by former Speaker Mike Chenault, was in response to President Barack Obama’s executive orders and legislative proposals to remove some of those constitutional rights from Americans.
The law was signed by then-Gov. Sean Parnell.
In his sponsor statement, Speaker Chenault wrote, “it is important that Alaska protect not only our Second Amendment rights but also asserting citizens’ and states’ rights guaranteed under the Ninth and Tenth Amendment.”
At the time, a proposal by Obama were based on the recommendation of a work group led by Biden, who was then vice president. The group was charged with coming up with concrete policies in response to gun violence.
“These proposals were the basis for the Presidential Executive Memoranda that were announced on January 16, 2013. The plan combines executive actions and calls for legislative action that ‘would help keep guns out of the wrong hands, ban assault and high-capacity magazines, make our schools safer, and increase access to mental health services.’ Although the executive memorandum does not carry the force of law, the recommendations calling for Congressional action could affect Second Amendment rights and the rights of states as well,” Chenault wrote in 2013.
[The Obama executive order was signed in 2015. Read more about it at this link.]
Democrats that year said the law put Alaskans at risk of criminal prosecution if they ignore federal gun laws.
Biden is also nominating David Chipman, who was for 25 years an ATF agent and oversaw the bureau’s firearms programs, as head of ATF. He is with a group led by former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot during a mass shooting in Tucson, in which 18 people were struck and six died.
