Analysis

Biden Makes False Claims About Guns In Executive Order Presser, Gets ATF Name Wrong

   DailyWire.com
US President Joe Biden speaks about gun violence prevention in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on April 8, 2021. - Biden on Thursday called US gun violence an "epidemic" at a White House ceremony to unveil new attempts to get the problem under control.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Democrat President Joe Biden made a number of false and misleading claims about firearms on Thursday as he announced his administration’s initial crackdown on Second Amendment rights.

At the start of his remarks, Biden controversially claimed that his plans to crack down on Second Amendment rights did not “in any way impinge on the Second Amendment.” Biden claimed that anyone suggesting that his actions were a crackdown on the Second Amendment was engaging in “phony arguments.” Biden claimed that “no amendment is absolute.”

Biden claimed that adding a stabilizing brace to a pistol makes it “more lethal” because it makes the firearm “more accurate.” While a brace can help stabilize the weapon, a person’s ability to be accurate with a firearm is largely dependent on how much they practice shooting. The idea that a brace makes a pistol “more lethal” is also not accurate because the brace does not alter the rate of fire of the pistol and does not alter the velocity of the projectile that is fired from the weapon.

Biden also again called for banning semi-automatic long guns—which essentially operate the same way that pistols do by firing one shot each time the trigger is pulled—and falsely suggested that a previous ban on those weapons that was enacted under the Clinton administration saved lives.

ProPublica, a left-wing journalism organization, reported that a study of the 1994 ban found “no evidence that it had reduced overall gun crime or made shootings less lethal.”

Biden also repeatedly got the name of the ATF wrong, calling it the “AFT.”

National Review senior writer David Harsanyi, who is a Second Amendment expert, highlighted some of the additional false claims that Biden made during his press conference.

Harsanyi disputed Biden’s statement that “From the beginning, you couldn’t own any weapon you wanted to own.”

Harsanyi wrote:

I can’t even begin to imagine what rickety basis there is for making such a claim. I mean, I wrote a book on the history of American guns, and never once did I run across any law that restricted Americans from owning any weapons they desired (unless we’re talking about blacks or Indians; because most gun restrictions in U.S. history have been employed to unarm the people who need weapons most). The idea of the federal government conducting any kind domestic “gun policy” whatsoever would have been a completely alien concept to anyone before the 1930s. Even then, no specific types of guns were banned from use. It wasn’t really until 1986 that that fully automatic guns were effectively banned by the federal government.

Harsanyi also pokes holes in Biden’s insinuation that those on the political right believe that the Second Amendment is “absolute” by noting that there are already “more laws restricting this guaranteed individual right than any other in the Constitution.” “The notion that gun ownership is ‘absolute’ — or anything in the proximity of absolute – is preposterous beyond words,” he adds. “Imagine your freedom of speech being contingent on an FBI background check?”

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