President Joe Biden is old enough to tempt many into thinking he was actually there when the nation was born.
But his recent comments about the Second Amendment show that, no, Biden was not only not there at America’s birth, but also that, like most liberals, he has a fundamental misunderstanding of the right to keep and bear arms.
Biden set “fact-checkers” in motion in announcing his new gun-control initiatives last week.
At the time, he said, “The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon.”
The “fact-checkers” at left-wing outlets like The Washington Post and PolitiFact, scolded Biden for his ignorance.
At the Post, columnist Glenn Kessler, who in April announced the Post was quitting its fact-checking database with Biden in the White House, rated his comments four Pinocchios.
Kessler on Monday pointed out that Biden had previously made the same claim and it had already been graded a lie.
Kessler quoted David Kopel, a gun rights expert at the Independence Institute, who noted that post-1791, “there were no federal laws about the type of gun you could own, and no states limited the kind of gun you could own.”
Kessler, to his credit, even went so far as to point out that the Constitution empowered Congress to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” which were waivers that allowed private citizens to act as pirates on behalf of the U.S. government against nations that were at war with America. “Individuals who were given these waivers and owned warships obviously also obtained cannons for use in battle,” Kessler observed.
“Some readers might think this is a relatively inconsequential flub. But we disagree. Every U.S. president has a responsibility to get American history correct, especially when he’s using a supposed history lesson in service of a political objective,” wrote Kessler. “Biden has already been fact-checked on this claim — and it’s been deemed false. We have no idea where he conjured up this notion about a ban on cannon ownership in the early days of the Republic, but he needs to stop making this claim.”
As Kessler noted, the liberals at PolitiFact took on Biden when he made the claim in May 2020 and deemed it “false,” also citing the pirate permission slips.
PolitiFact returned with Biden’s latest assertion and again ruled it false.
This time it was for getting the Second Amendment wrong.
After quoting a few law professors who pointed out Biden’s error, PolitiFact noted, “The Second Amendment limited government power, not the rights of individuals.”
“Broadly, gun regulation came decades after passage of the Second Amendment when gun technology changed. The first national gun regulation law did not rely on the Second Amendment. We rate Biden’s claim False.”
It would have been nice if PolitiFact had maintained that its argument was correct, that the Second Amendment is still aimed at curbing government power and not individual Americans.
Still, conservatives should welcome when liberals are willing to acknowledged one of Biden’s may lies.
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