The Patriot Post® · Biden Fires at the Wrong Target

“If you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.” That isn’t how President Joe Biden began his remarks on crime and guns yesterday, but it was the most eye-popping statement he made in an anti-Second Amendment speech littered with falsehoods and blunders.

Remember, this comes from the president of the party that wants you to think the federal government was nearly overthrown on January 6 by a few unarmed miscreants led by a shirtless guy in a furry horned costume.

And Biden only got to that utterly preposterous statement — imagine, by the way, if Donald Trump had “threatened” the American people with F-15s and nuclear weapons — after completely botching his history. We’ll quote him first:

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.

Those who say the blood of lib- — “the blood of patriots,” you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.

The point is that there has always been the ability to limit — rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it.

Fact-check: False. Misleading. Missing context.

Second Amendment expert David Harsanyi responded to a similar lie from Biden back in April. Of American gun laws prior to 1986, he explained, “I wrote a book on the history of American guns, and never once did I run across any law that restricted Americans from owning any weapons they desired (unless we’re talking about blacks or Indians; because most gun restrictions in U.S. history have been employed to unarm the people who need weapons most).”

Also, the “blood of patriots” quote Biden so badly mangled was from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Biden curiously leaves out the words “and tyrants” when he utters this line. He might not remember, but Jefferson was the author of, you know, the thing — the Declaration of Independence. And he wrote it after the first shots were fired by colonists armed only with guns against a tyrannical empire. Tyrants who, by the way, first tried to disarm Americans.

(If you want to know how that worked out for King George III, read his fake op-ed in The Babylon Bee.)

Biden trotted out the same old leftist proposals as Democrats always do, with the ironic exception being to use COVID money to “hire police officers.” This during the Democrat war on cops? Sure thing.

Otherwise, it was threatening rogue gun dealers, demanding more background checks, and pitching bans on “high-capacity” magazines and “assault weapons.” The latter two things are phony terms, of course — the correct terminology is standard-capacity magazines and semiautomatic rifles. Nevertheless, the same guy whose self-defense advice is to fire a double-barrel shotgun through the door hyperbolically says “no one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something.”

Quick, somebody give this man a late-night talk show.

Laws against these sorts of things are useless for fighting crime, as well as infringing the Second Amendment. As frequent gun writer Charles C.W. Cooke notes, “Between 1992 and 2015, crime in the United States dropped dramatically even as the American public bought hundreds of millions of new firearms and almost every state energetically liberalized its gun laws.” Clearly, there’s a correlation between guns and crime, but it’s the opposite of the one Democrats draw.

Indeed, the overarching point is that while crime is most certainly spiking, it’s not because of guns. As Mark Alexander wrote yesterday, “Violence is a Demo-induced culture problem, not a ‘gun problem.’ Criminals commit crimes, and until Democrats reverse course on the social policies that have devastated American families and communities for decades, the consequential violence will continue.”

It is this rampant growth in violent crime that should have Democrats hitting the panic button. Instead, many of them, including President-in-Waiting Kamala Harris, were busy last year giving attaboys and bail money to BLM and antifa rioters. And when they’re not directly fomenting violence, they’re aiding and abetting the destruction of families, which sows the seeds for violence.

So, Joe, spare us the bromides about “gun violence” and quit taking aim at the wrong target — law-abiding gun owners.

(Updated.)