President Joe Biden (D) addressed a joint session of Congress. Attacking our Second Amendment rights was a big part of his speech. Let’s unravel some of his spin, disinformation and, yes, outright lies.
“Gun violence has become an epidemic in America,” said Biden, trotting out one of his campaign lines.
Until 2020, America had seen a long, overall decline in violent crime. Last year, however, likely saw a rise—in some cities even a surge. This, of course, had nothing to do with gun ownership and rising gun sales; it had everything to do with riots, movements to defund the police, and so on.
Treating guns as an “epidemic” isn’t just empty rhetoric. It’s a way to push through a radical agenda under the smokescreen of a “public-health” issue. As America’s 1st Freedom reported previously, “[T]he entire ‘public-health’ approach is flatly inconsistent with the laws and customs of a free republic such as ours. Individual rights are just that: rights.”
Simply put, people can be dangerous, whereas firearms are just tools that, like any other, can be misused by criminals or used lawfully and responsibly; millions of Americans do the latter every day.
“I know how hard it is to make progress on this issue. In the 90s, we passed universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that hold a hundred rounds that can be fired off in seconds. We beat the NRA,” said Biden.
There’s a lot of misinformation to unpack in this short statement.
First, if “we passed universal background checks” in the 90s, why is one of his primary goals regarding gun control enacting “universal” background checks? His own “Plan to End our Gun Violence Epidemic” states that he will “enact universal background check legislation.”
Second, the “ban…on magazines that hold a hundred rounds” was actually a ban on the manufacture of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. Most new semi-automatic firearms come with standard-capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, so it is likely Biden referred to 100 rounds in an attempt to minimize the impact of what was previously passed, and what he currently supports.
Finally, he thinks “a hundred rounds” can be “fired off in seconds” from a semi-automatic rifle? He is either trying to create the impression that semi-automatic firearms operate the same as fully-automatic firearms, or he simply doesn’t know the difference. Ignorance, we suppose, can be a sort of bliss.
Biden loves to say how he “beat” the NRA, but he doesn’t admit that the ban, which lasted from 1994 to 2004, didn’t affect the murder rate and wasn’t about lowering the murder rate, as these rifles were then, and still are, very rarely used in crimes. Today, over 20 million of them are owned by American citizens. They use them for sport and for home defense.
At this point, it would be more shocking if Biden decided to tell the truth on something related to the Second Amendment, but this was not to be the case.
“These kinds of reasonable reforms have the overwhelming support from the American people, including many gun owners,” said Biden.
In reality, as America’s 1st Freedom reported, when “universal” background laws have been on ballots, the votes have been close; in fact, in Maine, Nevada, and Washington State, less than 53% of total voters supported this legislation—with Maine voters rejecting the measure—and that’s after the billionaires behind the anti-gun groups massively outspent the NRA.
Biden also mentioned non-existent background check loopholes and retreaded upon his desire to ban the so-called “assault weapons.”
Perhaps most interestingly, Biden did not mention his most radical proposal for attacking the Second Amendment, something he said would be the only thing he’d ask from God if he could have one thing: His desire to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), so activists can use frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt firearms manufacturers and dealers.
By comparison, just one year ago, then-President Donald J. Trump (R) said during his State of the Union address: “Just as we believe in the First Amendment, we also believe in another constitutional right that is under siege all across our country. So long as I am president, I will always protect your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”
Later that year, he said, “If Joe Biden gets in, your Second Amendment is gone. It’s gone—either obliterated to a point of being gone or gone itself.” It seems he was right, if Biden gets his way.
Towards the conclusion of Biden’s remarks on your Second Amendment rights, he said, “No amendment to the Constitution is absolute. … We’re not changing the Constitution, we’re being reasonable.”
To quote the late Justice Antonin Scalia, “This wolf comes as a wolf.”
Second Amendment supporters should take Biden’s word at face value now that he has laid out the most-overreaching and restrictive gun-control agenda of any presidency, one that is certainly not reasonable.
