Noted Constitutional Scholar Joe Biden Explains The Second AmendmentDon’t make him scramble the F-16s.BY: DAVID HARSANYI
JUNE 22, 2023
The day his son Hunter avoided punishment for breaking a slew of firearm laws, Joe Biden gave another speech on gun control.
Well, not exactly another one. The president delivered the same ludicrous speech he’s been giving for at least a decade. And it contained one of my favorite arguments:
And so, we have to change — there’s a lot of things we can change, because the American people by and large agree you don’t need a weapon of war. I’m a Second Amendment guy. I taught it for four years, six years in law school. And guess what? It doesn’t say that you can own any weapon you want. It says there are certain weapons that you just can’t own. Even during when it was passed, you couldn’t own a cannon. You can’t own a machine gun. (Laughter.) No, I’m serious.
So what’s the deal with the idea that it’s an absolute — you know, I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is — you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15. Anyway.
Virtually every word of this garbled nonsense is untrue.
The quote Biden keeps mangling originated with Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” (Biden leaves off that last part.) Jefferson’s support of sporadic revolutionary bloodletting (not his own) wasn’t shared by most of the founding generation, whose initial sympathy for the French Revolution quickly diminished with the news of violent mobs and mass executions.
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Moreover, contending, as the president does, that your weapon is basically useless because the state can simply scramble F-16s and murder you and everyone you love doesn’t really convey the message he thinks it does. What it tells me is that Biden might be a sociopath and we all need tanks.
The president could just as easily have said: “The First Amendment? Let’s see how your television station holds up when the government pulls the plug on the electrical grid!” or “You think the Fifth Amendment is going to save you when we torture you into a confession?” We all know the state is capable of abusing power. That’s the point.
None of this is even to mention that modern armies struggle to contain insurgencies equipped with little more than small arms. There have been countless such fights, including against Americans in places like Afghanistan. I guess we should be happy Biden didn’t threaten to nuke Kansas.
Also, AR-15s are not, and have never been, “weapons of war.” He keeps saying it. It’s not true.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/22/noted-constitutional-scholar-joe-biden-explains-the-second-amendment/