During his ABC town hall on Thursday night, Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden responded to a question about police reform by suggesting that cops should simply become Hollywood action heroes. “Instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg,” Biden said, with all the seriousness and credibility of a man wondering whether plane crash fatalities could be avoided by covering aircraft in bubblewrap. Biden of course is far from the first person to put forward this “just shoot them in the leg” thing. Anti-police activists often engage in similar silliness and attempts have been in New York state to legally require cops to aim for a suspect’s limbs.
The problem is that reality is not a movie. In reality, legs are a narrow, fast-moving part of the body. Unless we are requiring every police officer to be an expert level marksman — which would be an even taller order when we replace them with social workers, as has been suggested — it is absurd to expect that kind of pinpoint accuracy during a high pressure, quickly evolving situation. And even if you successfully hit the suspect’s leg, you may sever his femoral artery, the main source of blood to his lower extremities, causing him to bleed out. If you don’t hit the artery, you’ll have wounded him but not stopped him. Depending on where you hit him, and how much adrenaline or foreign chemicals are coursing through his veins, the suspect may still be able to run, walk, and certainly shoot.
This is just another piece of evidence indicating that Joe Biden lives in an ideological fantasy world — or else he is beholden to people who live in that world. And it wasn’t the most compelling piece of evidence to come out of last night’s town hall.
The former Vice President Biden also endorsed the insane notion that 8-year-olds can choose their own gender. When questioned by a mother who said that her 8-year-old daughter is “transgender” (a biological boy who now lives as a girl), Biden offered a typically rambling response:
I was raised by a man who, I remember, I was being dropped off, my dad was a high school-educated, well-read man who was a really decent guy, and I was being dropped off to get an application in the center of our city, Wilmington, Delaware, the corporate capital of the world at the time, and these two men are getting out to get an application to be a lifeguard in the African-American community, because there was a big swimming pool complex. And these two men, well-dressed, leaned up and hugged one another and kissed one another. I’m getting out of the car at the light, and I turned to my dad, and my dad looked at me, he said, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.”
It’s not clear what two men kissing at the pool has to do with transgender kids, but this part of the answer gets closer to the point:
The idea that an 8-year-old child, a 10-year-old child, decides, you know, “I want to be transgender, that’s what I think I’d like to be, it’d make my life a lot easier” — there should be zero discrimination. And what’s happening is, too many transgender women of color are being murdered. They’re being murdered… And so, I promise you, there is no reason to suggest that there should be any right denied your daughter… And by the way, my son, Beau, passed away, was the attorney general of the State of Delaware. he was the guy that got the first transgender law passed in the state of Delaware and because of a young man who became a woman, who worked for him in the attorney general’s office. And I’m proud of that.
It is a little hard to decipher his stream-of-consciousness, but he is clearly affirming the notion that a young boy may in some mystical way discover his own inner girlness and that the child ought to be able to act on that discovery by “becoming” a girl. He also amplifies the dubious claim that “transgender women” are the victims of some sort of hate crime epidemic. The evidence suggests that most trans murders have nothing to do with bigotry. The evidence — including the whole of biological science, and everything we know about child psychology — also indicates that males cannot in any scientific sense “become” girls, and that even if they could, children do not possess the psychological and emotional maturity to make life-altering decisions for themselves.
Joe Biden pretends not to understand basic biology or psychology. I say pretend because if he really believed what he says now, you’d expect that it would have come up at some point over the course of the first 70 years of his life. Yet Biden seems to have started talking about transgenderism sometime around 2012. He doesn’t appear to have said very much, if anything, about the issue before that. Did Joe Biden spend six decades of his life believing that gender is fluid, biological sex is changeable or irrelevant, and some little boys have little girls stuck inside them, without ever mentioning it publicly? If so, he is a monumental coward.
If instead this is a recent development, he should be required to explain it. What prompted him to decide, suddenly, that sometimes women can have penises and men can get pregnant? What data lead him to this startling conclusion? Or is he only pretending to believe in radical left-wing gender theory, and endorsing what is to my mind the psychological and emotional abuse of children, for political purposes? If so, we are back to him being a monumental coward. And also a liar.
These are questions he should have to answer. But that would require a real news media to ask them.
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The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.