After nearly three years in office, there are a lot of things I’ve come to expect out of the Biden administration. Coherent comments by the president aren’t among them.
Yet in announcing his new Office of Gun Violence Prevention, Biden had to open up and discuss so-called gun violence more broadly. He couldn’t just announce the office and leave it there, he had to explain to the press–the same guys who wanted this for years, mind you–why it was supposedly needed.
In discussing “gun violence,” however, Biden was his typical self, saying things that raised more than a few eyebrows.
On Friday, while touting his strict gun control laws, Biden continued his trend of lying when he claimed he has been to “every mass shooting.”
BIDEN: "I've been to every mass shooting" 🤔 pic.twitter.com/nxI5WkosIn
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 22, 2023
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Biden furthered his support for restricting the Second Amendment, saying, “If you need 80 shots in a magazine, you shouldn’t own a gun.”
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1705300678518751577?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1705300678518751577%7Ctwgr%5E012633eca698ddd4021a1fa97d6c188c33aa35f8%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftownhall.com%2Ftipsheet%2Fsaraharnold%2F2023%2F09%2F23%2Fbidens-bizarre-gun-control-remarks-n2628842
Yeah, buddy. That happened.
First, no, Biden hasn’t been to every mass shooting. Especially if you consider the definition of mass shooting that his party tends to prefer, which is the Gun Violence Archive definition that is just based on the number of people shot, not killed.
This definition inflates the number of mass shootings into a huge number, one that would make it impossible for Biden to visit every mass shooting.
Further, Biden offered no real qualifiers on those mass shootings, so even if we use the more traditional definitions that are based on the number of people killed, it’s unlikely he visited every mass shooting that ever happened in the US, much less the planet as a whole.
Because while people like Biden tend to pretend that mass shootings are uniquely American, they happen everywhere.
Then we get to the whole “if you need 80 shots in a magazine, you shouldn’t have a gun.”
First, there aren’t any 80-round magazines out there, though I suspect a company like Palmetto State Armory might be cooking up one right about now.
Yet even if there were, so what?
There is nothing in our Second Amendment that seems to support such a supposition. If we need X number of rounds, we shouldn’t have a firearm? Why is that? Under what criteria would we be allowed to have a gun? Is the limit 79 rounds? Five rounds? What exactly?
Now, generally speaking, people haven’t needed that many rounds for any lawful situation they might find themselves in. Many defensive gun uses take place with zero rounds being fired.
But many others take a lot more than some might think.
The truth is that no one who has survived a gunfight has ever said, “Gee, I wish I’d had less ammo.”
See, the problem with Biden’s myopic comment–and this is me trying to be charitable here–is that it doesn’t account for individual circumstances. There’s a difference between some guy pulling a gun on a mugger and someone who has angered an organized mob that wants their head.
Further, let’s remember that the Second Amendment isn’t about hunting or even muggers, specifically. Yes, the Tyranny of the Thug is a thing, but the amendment was essentially penned as an insurance policy on the rest of our rights. It was meant as a bulwark against tyranny as a whole.
Our Founding Fathers had just fought a war that started when the tyrannical government marched on a town to seize arms from them. It’s really unlikely that they intended to make it easier for a tyrannical leader to do the same again.
So no, there are no exceptions to the Second Amendment, no matter how many rounds you need in a magazine.
But since Biden clearly has never read the Second Amendment and definitely dismissed the Bruen decision, we’ve clearly got a long fight on our hands.
