Joe Biden has had a long career in politics. He’s worked his way up the ranks and has reached the office of the vice president of the United States. That’s not too shabby a career, if you look at it from the outside.

Now, I’m saying he’s done a good job at any of those levels, mind you. I’m just saying he’s worked his way up the ladder.

He’s currently running to be president, and one of his big issues is gun control.

Over at the Chicago Sun-Times, Jacob Sullum makes the case that Biden just doesn’t get the Second Amendment.

The Biden campaign’s website mentions the Second Amendment just once, saying, “It’s within our grasp to end our gun violence epidemic and respect the Second Amendment, which is limited.” Even that grudging acknowledgment is more than the Democratic Party’s platform offers.

After promising to respect the Second Amendment in 2004, 2008, and 2012, the Democrats erased the constitutional provision from their 2016 platform, although they did mention “the rights of responsible gun owners.” This year’s platform omits that phrase as well.

”I respect the Second Amendment,” Biden insisted last March while arguing with a Detroit autoworker about gun control. But the evidence he offered was not exactly reassuring.

”I have a shotgun,” Biden said. “My sons hunt.” He notably omitted any mention of the right to self-defense, which the Supreme Court has recognized as the Second Amendment’s “central component,” or of handguns, which the justices described as the “quintessential self-defense weapon.”

In explaining his plan to ban “high-capacity magazines,” Biden also talks about hunting. “Federal law prevents hunters from hunting migratory game birds with more than three shells in their shotgun,” his campaign says. “That means our federal law does more to protect ducks than children.”

This is, of course, prior to the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that magazine capacity bans are unconstitutional, of course. Not that it will change a thing. After all, Biden’s campaign website hasn’t changed a bit despite having had sufficient time to delete a few lines of text.

Then again, Biden thinks that we’re somehow protecting ducks more than children when it’s legal to hunt ducks, but even trying to harm a child is a criminal act. I fail to see how anyone can make that mental leap.

Sullum continues to talk about the Ninth Circuit decision, but finishes with this:

In any case, the 9th Circuit concluded, the law’s speculative benefits cannot possibly justify its sweeping breadth. “California’s near-categorical ban of LCMs strikes at the core of the Second Amendment,” it said.

Biden does not merely disagree with that analysis. The evidence suggests he does not even understand it.

However, I’m going to defend Biden just a bit here.

No, I’m not saying he’s right. Of course he isn’t. What I will say, though, is that he’s far from alone.

All around us, we see people who can’t seem to grasp the idea that the Second Amendment is a fundamental right to self-defense, that it’s about protecting this great nation, even from a tyrannical government if need be. They spout about hunting as if hunting has anything to do with the Second Amendment at all. It’s as idiotic a reading as those who think the First Amendment applies to computers and the internet, the Fourth to cell phones and laptops, but the Second only applies to muskets (especially since many American militiamen used the Kentucky rifle and not a “musket”).

Biden isn’t alone in his inability to grasp the purpose of the Second Amendment on any level at all. He never has, but neither have entire legions of his fellow anti-gunners.