President Joe Biden says he wants Democrats and Republicans to join together in responding to mass shootings like the recent attacks in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Tulsa. Yet the speech he delivered last night was suffused with the off-putting, aggressive self-righteousness that Democrats routinely display when they push new restrictions on firearms. Again and again, Biden implied that anyone who questions or resists the policy solutions he favors is complicit in the murder of innocents. As he frames the issue, there is no room for honest disagreement about the merits of those proposals, which are self-evidently the right thing to do.
That attitude is not exactly conducive to building the bipartisan consensus that Biden claims he wants. Nor is Biden's egregiously misleading deployment of the facts that he says demonstrate the urgency and effectiveness of the laws he supports. Biden does not want a rational, empirically informed debate about the costs and benefits of those laws. He prefers emotion to logic, and he demands that everyone else—including the Republicans he accuses of callous indifference to mass murder—do the same.
