President Joe Biden took some heat over the Memorial Day holiday weekend from people who claimed he was spreading “disinformation” about firearms and the Second Amendment.
Biden, who spent some of the weekend meeting with grieving families and local officials in Uvalde, Texas, has renewed his calls for gun control in the wake of the school shooting that took place there last Tuesday. But some of his claims — namely the notion that a 9 mm bullet “blows the lung out of the body” along with his oft-repeated assertion that individuals could not buy cannons when the Second Amendment was written — have prompted critics to call him out.
The Daily Caller’s David Hookstead commented on Biden’s claim regarding 9 mm bullets, asking, “Will fact checkers be flagging his comment as misinformation?”
"The 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body." – President Joe Biden
Will the fact checkers be flagging his comment as misinformation? pic.twitter.com/fFPPf7Cv44
— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) May 30, 2022
In addition to his assertion about 9 mm bullets, Biden also repeated the debunked claim that individual citizens could not purchase cannons when the Second Amendment was written.
"The Constitution, the Second Amendment was never absolute. You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed," Biden said. "I think things have gotten so bad that everybody is getting more rational about it."
— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) May 30, 2022
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley responded by suggesting that the president was trafficking in “disinformation,” addressing Biden’s push for gun control during an appearance on Fox News.
“There’s a real chilling effect on people talking about the facts of gun control. You know, people want to suggest that you can simply legislate away gun violence. That’s not going to happen. There’s 400 million weapons in this country, 15 million of which are estimated to be AR-15s,” Turley said. “But it also is a fact that when we banned assault weapons for that earlier period there was not an appreciable decrease in gun violence associated with it. So we can have what the president calls a common sense discussion, but we need to be able to deal with it on a factual rather than purely rhetorical way.”
“And it’s got to start with the president. Today he repeated a clearly false statement about the Second Amendment,” Turley continued. “Many of us have repeatedly said that his statement that you could not own a cannon or other weapons when the Second Amendment was ratified is untrue. Even The Washington Post admitted it’s untrue and yet the president keeps on repeating that as a defense for his call for gun control. He’s undermining his own case by repeating what is ironically disinformation.”