In the absence of restricting gun ownership, the next best way to limit gun rights is to make firearm ownership and use prohibitively expensive and difficult. That may be the real reason for the White House’s latest round of sanctions on Russia, and it’s part of a much larger effort that extends far beyond trade regulations.
In addition to pushing for new federal gun restrictions and taxes, leftwing activists and investors have launched various other assaults aimed at gun owners, manufacturers and sellers.
For example, it’s now common practice for anti-gun groups to sue manufacturers whenever there is a highly publicized mass shooting, and then for courts to keep sellers and manufacturers bogged down in costly cases for many years.
High legal expenses and bad press that keep investors away are two of the biggest reasons Remington Arms filed for bankruptcy in 2020, despite the year’s high gun sales. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, Remington was still in the midst of fending off lawsuits first filed in the wake of the mass shooting that occurred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.
Some banks, financial institutions and investors have also been working in recent years to punish gun manufacturers and sellers. Citibank, Bank of America, PayPal and other supporters of the environmental, social and governance movement sweeping corporate and financial America are using their wealth and power to deny access to capital and other banking and financial services to some gun manufacturers and sellers. Over time, this problem is likely to get substantially worse, putting the entire industry at risk.
The left knows it doesn’t have the political power to do what it really wants – a near-complete repeal of the Second Amendment – so it has turned to every other trick in the book to accomplish the same goal, while hiding, as the Biden administration is now, its true motivation.