Joe Biden will ultimately fail in his bizarre effort to redefine 9mm pistols as “high-caliber weapons,” but we can’t blame the guy for trying.

After all, it’s what Democrats do — especially in times of crisis. For example, “facts” are now disinformation, “global warming” is now climate change, “riots” are now peaceful protests, “court packing” is now unpacking, “infrastructure” is now child care, and the Obama-era “detention cages” on our southern border are now reception facilities.

“They said a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out — may be able to get it and save the life,” said Joe Biden outside the White House yesterday upon returning from Uvalde, Texas. “A nine-millimeter bullet blows the lung out of the body. So, the idea of these high-caliber weapons is, uh, there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting.”

Far be it from us to question the president’s ballistics expertise, but firearms are meant to be lethal weapons, not non-lethal ones. As such, they’re meant to have stopping power. But perhaps Biden would rather his kinder, gentler Secret Service detail be armed with pea-shooters instead.

“Remember, the Constitution was never absolute,” he railed.

Really? We wonder: What part of “shall not be infringed” was never absolute?

“You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed,” Biden falsely asserted. “You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weaponry.”

One thing about Joe Biden: He won’t allow a resounding fact-check to get in the way of a deceitful narrative. Otherwise, he wouldn’t keep repeating that ridiculous Revolutionary War “cannon” canard in the face of a two-year-old repudiation from left-leaning PolitiFact.

This suggestion of a ban on 9mm pistols is bold even for Biden, but it comes at a predictable time: in the aftermath of an unspeakable massacre. As we’ve noted before, the Left politicizes everything, and guns are no exception.

Perhaps our president has been on the phone with the gun-grabbing tinpot socialist up north, who’s already taking steps to freeze Canada’s handgun ownership and institute a buyback of “assault-style firearms” [sic]. When an American president follows the lead of a Canadian socialist, we’re in dangerous times.

But here in the U.S., where Joe Biden’s vice president has already called for a ban on “assault weapons” [sic], the anti-Second Amendment backlash goes beyond just the types of firearms that law-abiding citizens are allowed to own. It also includes an effort to enact “red flag” laws, also known as Extreme Risk Protection Orders, which allow judges to seize a person’s guns without a trial based solely on a written complaint that the person might be a danger to himself or others. All a judge needs is “reasonable suspicion.”

As Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie and Executive Director for the Crime Prevention Research Center Nikki Goeser note:

It has always been possible to take a dangerous person’s guns away. All 50 states and the federal government have involuntary commitment laws that go by various names. … They all require a mental health expert to testify before a judge, but hearings can occur quickly in urgent cases. … But red flag laws remove all these due process protections. Based only on a written complaint, which could come from a relative, friend, neighbor, or police officer, a judge decides whether to take away a person’s guns. There is no ability to challenge claims or to offer testimony from a mental health care expert. … We don’t want a world where police make unannounced predawn raids or people lose their fundamental right to self-defense without a judicial hearing. For some, it’s a matter of life and death.

Indeed, the right of self-defense is the first civil right. Without it, no other rights matter. Likewise, the Second Amendment is the constitutional right that guarantees all others. It’s “the palladium of the liberties of the Republic,” as James Madison’s Supreme Court appointment, Joseph Story, wrote in his landmark Commentaries on the Constitution. (If Madison was the Constitution’s author, Story was its foremost judicial interpreter.)

What to do, then, to protect our children? First, we must harden our schools, which are the softest of soft targets. Think about it: We use firearms to protect every other institution and entity. Why are we unwilling to protect our precious children with the same determination?

UPDATE: There’s been another clean-up on aisle 46, as Joe Biden’s handlers have since walked back his idiotic remarks about banning those “high-caliber” lung-extracting 9mm handguns.