Fox News host Tucker Carlson highlighted on Thursday night President Joe Biden’s new push to restrict Second Amendment rights, warning that Democrats’ agenda is not about guns, it’s about having control over Americans.
“Gun control is not about guns. Gun Control is about who controls America,” Carlson said. “Is it the population as in a democracy? Or does all control go to a small group of authoritarians as in oligarchy? Those are the stakes in the gun control debate. It’s not about guns, it’s about who runs the country. So with that in mind, Joe Biden’s speech calling for more gun control should make you uncomfortable. Almost nothing Biden said was true.”
Video of Carlson’s entire segment and a full transcript are available below.
WATCH:
TRANSCRIPT:
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Good evening, and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. We often accuse politicians of dishonesty on this show, but there are grades of it, let’s boil it down. Nothing the Democratic Party advocates for is more dishonest than gun control. Everything about that one specific issue is false. Most policy debates actually aren’t like that. And we try to be honest about it on the show. No matter how passionate you are about a position that you have, you can still sort of see what the other side is talking about. You might, for example, deeply dislike taxes, but you can still acknowledge it is fair to charge people for the services they receive from the government. So the other side isn’t crazy. They just have arrived at a different number than you did. Or you can hate abortion, and we do, and you can still understand, if again if you’re being totally honest about it, why is scared pregnant teenager might be tempted to have one. But gun control is not like that. Gun control is entirely fraudulent. The Democratic Party claims that guns cause violence. That’s the core claim, and it is a lie. It is provably untrue. The places in this country that have the most guns, and the loosest controls on those guns also have the least gun violence, the fewest killings. That’s the bottom line. You can look it up, it’s publicly available to anyone. Anyone who tries to restrict your legally own firearms is not trying to make America safer. The point is to disarm you, to strip you of your autonomy, your power, your right of self defense.
Gun control is not about guns. Gun Control is about who controls America. Is it the population as in a democracy? Or does all control go to a small group of authoritarians as in oligarchy? Those are the stakes in the gun control debate. It’s not about guns, it’s about who runs the country. So with that in mind, Joe Biden’s speech calling for more gun control should make you uncomfortable. Almost nothing Biden said was true. We could go down the list, but here are a few highlights to give you the flavor. Biden claimed that firearms purchased at gun shows are exempt from background checks. That’s a lie as anyone who’s ever been to a gun show can tell you. Joe Biden claimed that gun manufacturers have total immunity against lawsuits. That’s also a lie. Gun manufacturers get sued all the time, ask them, etc. So it was a speech aimed to mislead rather than to inform. Before he announced how he plans to restrict your Second Amendment rights, Joe Biden wanted to remind you those rights are not real in the first place. They are not as he put it, absolute.
[START VIDEO]
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT: Nothing I’m about to recommend in any way impinges on the Second Amendment. They’re phony arguments suggesting that these are Second Amendment rights at stake with what we’re talking about. But no amendment, no amendment, to the Constitution is absolute.
[END VIDEO]
CARLSON: You heard the sirens in the background responding to the skyrocketing crime rate in the city he presides over. But the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That’s the promise in the U.S. Constitution. But according to Joe Biden, it’s still not an absolute right, despite what the text says. No, that right is subject to his approval and his interpretation. Joe Biden is in charge of the Constitution now. Joe Biden defines its terms. And Joe Biden has decided that something called ‘stabilizing braces’ can no longer be allowed. Now, stabilizing brace is used by target shooters to hold heavy firearms. They played zero role in the murder epidemic now underway in our cities. Then why is Joe Biden banning them without the approval of Congress? Probably because up to 40 million law abiding Americans own this device. And under this order, Joe Biden’s order, every one of those people will have to alert federal authorities and pay hundreds of dollars in fines for the crime of owning a harmless piece of plastic that was legal yesterday. And if they don’t comply, Joe Biden’s federal authorities can then drag them off in handcuffs, seize their property and charge them with the felony. So with a single stroke of a pen, Joe Biden just turned tens of millions of overwhelmingly Republican voters into criminals. Is it starting to make sense now? Think about that for a minute and you’ll begin to understand why the Democratic Party is so focused on what they call ‘weapons of war.’ You might know them as semi automatic small caliber sporting rifles that normal people use for hunting and target shooting and home defense. Here’s the thing that you should know and again, don’t take our word for it, look it up. No subject is more carefully catalog than gun violence. Guns like this, these so called ‘weapons of war’ play no meaningful role in crime. Virtually all gun murders in this country are committed with handguns. A small number of people, again provable, a small number of people are responsible for most of the violence and the use a small variety of weapons to commit. Those weapons are not rifles here. Here are the numbers. According to the most recent data from the FBI, firearms were involved in a total of 10,258 homicides in 2019, the last year for which data are available, fewer than 500, out of more than 10,000 of those homicides were committed with rifles, rifles of all kinds, including so-called ‘weapons of war.’ Criminals don’t use rifles, they’re not concealable. Maybe that’s why, in fact, more people were murdered with knives than with rifles. So if you actually cared about making the country safer, keeping people from getting murdered, you would target handguns in big cities. That’s where the murders are. That’s where the violence is. But the Biden administration is doing the opposite of this. The mirror image of this, the Biden administration, is letting big city criminals go. People who use guns for violence are walking out of jail. And instead the Biden administration is using, and you saw it today, the full force of government to disarm peaceful voters in zip codes that voted for Donald Trump. It is that simple. Today, Biden announced that he wants to ban what he calls ‘assault weapons.’ He’s speaking about the AR-15, which is the single most popular sporting rifle in America. So the question is, if we banned so called assault weapons, would the country become safer? That’s the only question that matters. And we don’t need to guess about the answer. Because we tried this before. Under Bill Clinton, for 10 full years, we banned assault rifles, and then by law, the Department of Justice studied the effects. So we know the effect and you again can look it up if you want, it didn’t work. In fact, once that ban expired in 2004, gun homicides fell in almost every major city. So policies like this one are unhinged from reality, to put it gently.
So to enforce them, Joe Biden has nominated a man who is unhinged from reality. His name is David Chipman, and he will now run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, an agency that Joe Biden referred to today as the AFT.
[START VIDEO]
BIDEN: Today I’m proud to nominate David Chipman to serve as a director of the AFT. David knows the AFT well.
[END VIDEO]
CARLSON: ‘David knows AFT well,’ hilarious. If you’re Joe Biden, everything is a teachers union. They have to use a teacher’s union. So who is David Chipman? Well, he’s a conspiracy not for one thing. In a recent internet post on Reddit. He claimed that the Branch Davidian shot down helicopters during the Waco siege in 1993. No, they didn’t. No one a board of federal helicopter was shot or injured that day, their helicopters didn’t crash. That is a bizarre claim to make from someone who is directly involved in the case, as David Chipman was, but it’s worse than that. In 1993, the ATF killed dozens of innocent children and at least one pregnant woman for no obvious reason. It’s one of the worst things that federal agents have ever done in this country. So, if you’re taking over the ATF, maybe you could apologize for that. But no, David Chipman lied about it and then attacked the dead. It was like blaming the Japanese for their own internment or attacking the victims the Tuskegee experiment for getting syphilis. It was not evidence of a generous spirit. It was evidence of a zealot. This is the man Joe Biden just nominated to lead ATF. But it gets worse than that. In a Reddit post, David Chipman suggested that people who fail background checks should be arrested on the spot, quote, ‘while at ATF, I conducted studies involving people who failed background checks to determine how many later committed crimes for the gun, many did. This is a perfect opportunity to arrest people before committing crimes, rather than responding after the fact.’ Arrest people before they commit crimes. That is a brand new concept in American law. Although the Chinese are highly familiar with it.
But the suggestion does raise a point of pressing interest to the Biden family. Joe Biden just appointed a guy who thinks people who lie on federal firearms background checks should go to prison. Oh, well. Do you know any? Hunter Biden purchased a handgun illegally. He lied on a federal background check. That’s not speculation, he did. We’ve seen the form. So the question is Will David Chipman arrest the president’s son? And if he doesn’t arrest the president’s son, the question is, how exactly are you obligated to follow these rules? That’s a serious question. Can you live in a country where the rules don’t apply to the president’s son but you could go to jail for violating them? How can you participate in a system like that? Again, sincere question. They should explain. We should note that David Chipman has said a lot of other things on the internet that he doesn’t want you to see. He’s locked his Twitter account so that nobody can read it. But The Daily Wire found an archived version of his Twitter page and compared it to his current page. They found that David Chipman deleted at least 1,000 tweets in recent days. And we can only speculate about what he said in those posts. We do know that what he said publicly tells us all we need to know about how we got this job. In October 2018, for example, David Chipman told The Hill that AR-15s should be treated quote ‘just like machine guns.’ Well, machine guns are banned in this country, he believes AR-15s, the single most popular rifle in America, should be banned. Chipman made that remark in his capacity as a policy advisor for an anti-gun group, one of the many funded by Michael Bloomberg.
In 2012. He suggested on MSNBC that the Secret Service shouldn’t carry firearms. And last year, David Chipman openly mocked the millions of Americans who were buying firearms to protect their families from the crime wave the David Chipman’s party has unleashed on the country.
[START VIDEO]
DAVID CHIPMAN, BIDEN NOMINEE FOR ATF DIRECTOR: They might think that they’re diehard ready to go. But unfortunately, they’re more like Tiger King, and they’re putting themselves and their families in danger. And so what I would suggest is for those people who were first time gun owners, if they did go out and buy a gun, I would secure that gun locked and unloaded and hide it behind the cans of tuna and beef jerky that you have stored in the cabinet. And, you know, only bring that out if the zombies start to appear. And I don’t think they are.
[END VIDEO]
CARLSON: It’s hard to imagine a flippant remark that’s more infuriating than that one. If you bought a gun to protect your family, your business, your home, during the riots, that these people unleashed on the country, a conspiracy nut running the ATF calls you crazy. That’s why if you made the mistake of buying a handgun with a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds, in other words, if you bought a Glock 19, or any of the most popular handguns sold in America, you will be obligated to surrender it to that guy.
[START VIDEO]
REPORTER: And high capacity means what kind of numbers are we talking about?
CHIPMAN: Yeah, so I think the consensus has been around 10. And there are a number of reasons why.
REPORTER: So 10 and above would be high?
CHIPMAN: Yeah, well, I think let’s say 10 and below are okay or reasonable, above 10 would be regulated.
[END VIDEO]
CARLSON: So this raises a lot of questions. Why is David chipping allowed to decide how many rounds you’re allowed in your magazine? What does he know about that? Is he in charge of protecting your family? Does he live in your neighborhood? Are your children his responsibility? It’s outrageous. But worse than that is theater. It’s not real. People like David Shipman aren’t opposed to gun violence. In fact, people like David Chipman, his party certainly, are making gun violence possible in this country. We could give you many examples, we have for years. Here’s a new one in Washington, the city is planning to stop enforcing gun laws. Really? The party that thinks guns cause violence is no longer pulling them off the street. Why? Because it’s racially insensitive to do that. A DC police commander called John Haynes just sent a memo announcing this policy quote, ‘no longer are we focused on getting guns … No idea is too small or too radical…’
Aren’t they telling us the other side of their mouth that your guns are their problem? Right? Your guns, not the criminals guns, your guns, because you’re the criminal now. Meanwhile, in Chicago, where a 21 month old child was just shot on the street last month. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has decided that not all guns need to be removed from the streets. No, just the one thing you own. According to Lori Lightfoot. The real danger is not handguns, its quote ‘military grade weapons from other states.’
…
CARLSON: This is this is one of those topics, it’s hard to do on TV, because in about an hour you can learn more about this topic, actual facts about this topic that every single person making the policy. Everything they say is untrue and provably so. There’s no issue in which they lie more than this one, which tells you a lot. Lori Lightfoot’s statement, the one you just saw, is a shocking lie. And Chicago’s own data prove it. Most violent crimes in Illinois were committed with guns purchased in the state. According to Chicago police from 2018 2019, authorities encountered a grand total of, how many people armed with military gear rifles or all rifles? Four. Four people in the whole city in a year with rifles. That’s it. And that’s what Lori Lightfoot is focused on. In that same period they encountered 44 people armed with revolvers. They encountered 15 people armed with chemical weapons, whatever that is, another 32 people wielding their feet in a violent manner. And the rest of course, for semi automatic handguns. That’s where all the murders are committed with and everyone knows it. Rifles are not a real threat in Chicago and they haven’t been for a long time if ever. Between 2013 and 2016, just 4.8% of guns recovered by the Chicago Police were rifles, 4.8%. The most recent murder report from Chicago was from all the way back in 2011. They’re a little slow in the numbers there. But according to that report, just one rifle was used in a homicide in the city of Chicago. One. And that’s what they want to take away. Why? Because you own it, not the criminals. In the decade that followed, a George Soros-funded DA called Kim Foxx took over in Chicago, and during her tenure, prosecutors started dropping cases for serious gun crimes, not accidentally, but as a matter of policy, they intentionally dropped the gun crimes. Aggravated battery with a firearm, unlawful use of a weapon, reckless discharge of a firearm, aggravated discharge, serious crimes involving guns. They dropped the charges. They’re not worried about gun crime. They’re worried about you protecting yourself. And not just in Chicago, across the country. Criminals who commit violence with guns are going free. Murder rates are hitting record levels. Meanwhile, you haven’t heard anyone, you haven’t done anything wrong. But suddenly Hunter Biden has a fat book contract from Simon and Schuster, and you’re a felon for trying to defend your home. You can see what’s going on here. Again, they’re not trying to control guns. They’re trying to control you.