Joe Biden Doesn’t Understand Guns (Or The Constitution)

On 4/9/2021, President Joe Biden gave a Press Conference on the issue of gun control. Considering Biden is the man behind both the Gun-Free Zone Act of 1990 and the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, it should be rather obvious what his opinion on the topic is. Biden has been a gun grabbed for decades, and he will look for every excuse possible to take away your firearms.

Here is one objectively wrong thing Joe Biden said:

Most people don’t know, you walk into a store and you buy a gun, you have a background check. But you go to a gun show, you can buy whatever you want and no background check.

For the record, that is objectively wrong, sellers at gun shows do have to do background checks on anyone they sell guns to and the ATF even has a page on its website dedicated to information on this very topic. Politifact writers Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman rated this statement Mostly False and The Washington Post gave this statement Two Pichonios.

Mind you, Biden’s lie is nothing more than a repackaging of an old incorrect statement believed by the Democrats. The idea of a “gun show loophole,” is a common one, and The Brady Campaign even said in 2010 that:

Because of the gun show loophole, in most states, prohibited buyers can walk into any gun show and buy weapons from unlicensed sellers with no background check. Many of these gun sellers operate week-to-week with no established place of business, traveling from gun show to gun show.

However, the evidence has never been with the Democrats on this one. A study from 1997 by the National Institute of Justice found that less than 2% of gun crime takes place with a firearm bought at a gun show. The Congressional Research Service also wrote the following in 2019:

Private firearms sales at gun shows or any similar venue did not appear to be a significant source of guns carried by these offenders, while private transfers among family members, friends, and acquaintances did appear to account for a significant source of such firearms.

Of course, this is part of a common tactic Democrats use on guns: Make it sound as easy to get them as possible. For example, Senator Alex Padilla said this in response to various state voter suppression laws on 3/23/2021:

In a majority of states, new voters are able to obtain a rifle quicker than they’re able to cast their first ballot. It seems to me we have our priorities entirely backwards when it comes to this — when we make it easier to buy a gun than we do to cast a ballot.

For the record, Democrats are never able to point to a single state where this is the case, which is especially odd considering these states are supposedly in the majority.

President Obama was also fond of spewing this nonsense, saying it’s easier to buy a gun than it is to buy a book, to buy vegetables, and to buy a computer. Once again, all of these are lies and everyone across the political spectrum realized them to be such.

Even when one can make a case a gun is too easy to get, gun-control activists still have to exaggerate the claim. Michael Moore’s 2002 film Bowling For Columbine began by talking about a bank that gave anyone who opened an account a free rifle. Moore walks out of the bank with a rifle, implying the bank would simply give it to anyone without any kind of background check. In truth, Moore greatly compressed the process the bank used, which involved performing a background check (Moore also didn’t mention that the people handing him a gun were licensed dealers).

However, there’s one other claim Biden made that should be getting just as much, if not more, attention not only for how wrong it is, but also because it shows a dangerous side of Joe Biden not just on the gun issue, but also on the entire Constitution:

There are phony arguments suggesting that these are Second Amendment rights at stake for what we’re talking about. But no amendment, no amendment to the Constitution is absolute. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater.

For those who are unaware, the “fire in a crowded theater” analogy comes from the Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, decided on 3/3/1919. In the case, the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal for a person to give speeches and hand out pamphlets encouraging people to dodge the draft during World War One. The case was more related to wartime exceptions to the absolute most liberal interpretations of the First Amendment than it was the general idea of general exceptions during peacetime or the idea that any other amendment can be restricted.

Here’s an amendment Joe Biden should look up, the Ninth Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Basically, not only are all the rights listed in the Constitution absolute, but they mean everything that’s implied by those Amendments even if the Founding Fathers did not list them.

It should also be noted that the same Supreme Court that gave Joe Biden that analogy has also said it does not apply in the case of the Second Amendment. Presser v. Illinois saw the Supreme Court ruling the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear arms in 1886, although it did say that states could regulate gun ownership however they wanted while the federal government could not. This was both upheld and expanded to forcing state and local governments to apply with the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010. It was then ruled in the 2016 case Caetano v. Massachusetts that this right applies to “all forms of bearable arms.”

Basically, Biden knows nothing about either guns or the constitution, and he wants to craft a constitutional gun policy.