When it comes to Joe Biden’s rambling, anti-gun speeches, sometimes he seems just confused, and sometimes he mistakenly reveals his true agenda of eradicating the Second Amendment and stripping virtually every law-abiding American of their right to arms and self-defense.
But at this point in his term at the White House, actual lies are becoming far more frequent and far more concerning.
On June 16, at the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Conn., Biden spoke to a group of “gun control” activists, delivering a speech that vacillated between confusing and borderline unintelligible (feel free to try to follow his train of thought with this official transcript).
What was clear in the speech, however, was Biden’s willingness to make things up, as it appears the legacy media is rarely willing to offer any sort of a “fact-check” when he talks about guns. And we’re not just talking about differences of opinion on firearm-related policy, subjective interpretations of certain events, or carefully manipulated statistics to support particular anti-gun views.
This speech had so much wrong with it that we may not be able to cover everything, but here are some of the lowlights.
First, he began talking about the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), the anti-gun law he signed last year.
Biden praised the $230 million that the law allows being used to entice states into enacting “red flag” firearm confiscation schemes, then absurdly claimed his “son was the first to enforce (such laws) when he was attorney general (of Delaware).” But his son, Beau Biden, was Delaware’s attorney general from 2007-2015, and Delaware did not enact its “red flag” law until 2018.
He also tried to imply that the illegal trafficking of firearms was not illegal until the enactment of the BSCA. While the Act does explicitly define a federal standard, and penalties for “trafficking in firearms” as such, virtually every discrete act necessary to perpetrate an illegal firearm trafficking conspiracy has been criminalized since the 1968 Gun Control Act.
Biden further tried to claim that the BSCA made “straw purchases”—when one buys a firearm for someone else who is prohibited by law from doing so—illegal. Again, while “straw purchases” may not have been banned as such under federal law, the act of purchasing a firearm for someone else who is prohibited from purchasing one has been illegal for decades, as has misrepresenting who the “actual buyer” of the firearm is.
In essence, any time you make a material misstatement when you purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer—as the media is reporting the president’s son, Hunter, has recently admitted doing—you have violated federal law and can be subject to years in prison and substantial fines. While Hunter’s offense would appear to have a potential 10-year sentence, media reports indicate the Justice Department has offered him a plea deal that could result in dismissal of the gun charge. So much for his dad’s tough talk about illegal firearms.
In defending the need for the BSCA, Biden did what he regularly does, and made a ridiculous claim unsupported by any facts:
“And in most cities — down in Philadelphia and New York, areas I know well — like up here — you’d see a truck pull up, pull to the curb, and selling weapons — selling guns, selling AR-15. Selling weapons.
“Well, guess what? You do that now, you go to jail.”
Sadly, Biden’s understanding as to how criminals operate appears to come from movies rather than real life, as the type of situation he described could only be imagined by a Hollywood screenwriter. To date, no one has corroborated Biden’s account of trucks selling AR-15s curbside in America’s largest, most populated cities. Unlicensed firearms dealing was illegal before the BSCA, and it still is.
Of course, Biden wasn’t done underscoring his anti-Second Amendment agenda with his reference to the BSCA. He went on to rail against the long-standing American tradition of law-abiding citizens completing their own customized firearms at home, claiming he “made it illegal to manufacture so-called ‘ghost guns’” through an executive order. In fact, the order and subsequent rulemaking, although overreaching in their own rights, did not go this far.
He then went on to make arguably the most incoherent, nonsensical anti-gun argument he has ever made as he tried to highlight another action he took against handguns equipped with stabilizing braces:
“It made it harder for people to buy stabilized brief — braces. Put a pistol on a brace, and it ma- — turns into a gun. Makes them where you can have a higher-caliber weapon — a higher-caliber bullet coming out of that gun.”
First, one puts a brace on a pistol, not the other way around. But since the pistol is already a gun, is he saying attaching the brace somehow transforms the brace into a gun? Perhaps this is Biden’s own imaginative interpretation of the transitive property.
If A is a gun, but B is not a gun, but A+B is a gun, then B must be a gun once added to A, even if you later subtract it?
Then there’s the nonsense about “a higher-caliber bullet coming out of that gun.” Does Biden imagine that stabilizing braces have the magical ability to transform the chamber and barrel of any handgun to which they are attached? Because that is the only way that comment could possibly make sense. If you put a stabilizing brace on a handgun chambered for 9mm, that handgun can still only fire 9mm ammunition. The same goes for any caliber handgun on which you affix a stabilizing brace.
Then again, this is the same firearm “expert” who once proclaimed legislation he supports “says there can be no more than eight bullets in a round” and told supporters at a campaign rally, “I believe in the Second Amendment, but nobody says you can have a magazine with 100 clips in it.”
Again, we are not exaggerating when we say this was one of Biden’s most confusing, unintelligible speeches on firearms he has ever given, and we’ve left out quite a bit of the nonsense. Go read the transcript. Or, just go to his closing, where he blurts out, “God save the Queen, man.”
We have no theory to explain what he meant by that apparent reference to a deceased monarch. But it is emblematic of a man who is increasingly detached from reality, reason, accountability, and shame, and never more so than when is speaking about firearms.
About NRA-ILA:
Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess, and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Visit: www.nra.org
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