President Joe Biden announced new regulations to curb the proliferation of so-called “ghost guns,” unserialized firearms made from kits.
Biden spoke of codifying a prohibition on manufacturing these firearms without serial numbers, requiring sellers to conduct a background check on prospective buyers, among other rules. He also detailed his desire to see assault weapons and high-capacity magazines banned.
Then the president invoked history to support his stance.
“From the very beginning, the Second Amendment didn’t say you can own any gun you want, big as you want,” Biden said at the press conference. “You couldn’t buy a cannon when, in fact, the Second Amendment passed.”
This isn’t the first time Biden made such an assertion about the Second Amendment. Or even the second.
During his presidential campaign, he made a similar claim about cannon ownership in the Revolutionary War. We rated that False.
Then, in 2021, Biden said the Second Amendment “limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own.” False again.
The text of the amendment is brief: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
“Biden’s statement is completely false,” said David Kopel, the research director and Second Amendment project director at the Independence Institute. “Neither in 1791 nor in the preceding centuries was there any American law against owning particular types of arms.”
Historians have previously told PolitiFact that Biden mischaracterized the history of gun regulation and its ties to the Second Amendment.
While there are robust regulations dealing with gun ownership today, federal gun regulation came in 1934, decades after the Second Amendment was introduced into the U.S. Bill of Rights. That regulation did not rely upon the Second Amendment.
* story by PolitiFact
