Stop the Presses! NRA and CNN Agree: Joe Biden Lies on Guns

[Lyin' Joe]

Biden lies about everything. He lies so much he can't tell lies from
truth.

It’s not often that NRA finds itself in agreement with CNN’s reporting
about firearms, but the outlet’s fact-check of Joe Biden’s Connecticut
gun control speech last week proved the cable news channel is capable of
accurately reporting on guns … when it wants to. The piece noted that
Biden “made at least five false claims related to guns, a subject on
which he has repeatedly been inaccurate during his presidency.” While we
might quibble that CNN actually undercounted the number of false claims
related to guns Biden made in that address, their reporting was right on
the money in the examples they did cite.

The first falsehood CNN raised was one we identified in our own fact
check of Biden’s speech, this one concerning red flag laws. Biden
claimed his son, Beau – who was Delaware attorney general from 2007 to
2015 – was the “first to enforce” this sort of law. This was clearly
false, as both NRA and CNN noted, insofar as Delaware did not even have
a red flag law to enforce during Beau Biden’s term in office.

CNN’s next item was also raised in our piece, Biden’s bizarre claims
about the effects of stabilizing braces on pistols. The
factually-challenged chief executive insisted affixing a pistol to a
brace (itself a weird inversion of how the two items actually go
together) “turns [the pistol] into a gun” and “[m]akes them where you
can have … a higher caliber bullet – coming out of that gun.” CNN got it
right, pointing out: a “pistol is, obviously, already a gun,” and, “a
pistol brace does not have any effect on the caliber of ammunition that
a gun fires or anything about the basic functioning of the gun itself.”
Indeed, all the brace does is help stabilize a pistol for more accurate,
controlled, and safe operation, particularly for those – like combat
wounded veterans – who are physically challenged. Leave it to gun
control advocates to take issue with that.

The third falsehood CNN identified was one we omitted from our own
article this week for space considerations but have raised many times in
the past: the gun industry is NOT, as Biden claimed, the “only industry
in America you can’t sue.” Biden’s insistent lies on this point are used
to attack the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which
merely protects members of the firearms industry acting in accordance
with the law from being held responsible for the acts of unaffiliated
criminals who misuse guns. The CNN piece correctly states that gun
industry members “can still be held liable for (and thus sued for)” the
industry members’ own alleged wrongdoing. Nevertheless, Biden wants
unscrupulous trial lawyers and gun control advocates to sue the gun
industry into oblivion, so repealing the PLCAA is at the top of his gun
control wish list.

Fourth in CNN’s list was a claim so obviously and transparently false
that it didn’t even occur to us to include it in our own fact check.
That was Biden’s claim that “the NRA is the only outfit in the nation
that we cannot sue as an institution.” The anti-gun media’s gleeful
reporting of the NRA’s voluminous (and largely unavoidable) legal fees
from a variety of different lawsuits by opponents in and outside of
government is proof enough of this fact.

The fifth Biden gun lie CNN identified in its piece was his claim – made
to support his assertion that the Second Amendment limits what sorts of
weapons Americans can have – “[y]ou can’t own a machine gun.” CNN
correctly pointed out, as we often have ourselves, that there are
hundreds of thousands of machine guns in the U.S. that eligible
transferees are perfectly entitled to own under U.S. law, if they are
willing to pay the price and negotiate the bureaucracy to do so.

Despite mentioning “5 false claims about guns” in its headline and in
the introduction to the piece, CNN identified a sixth such claim Biden
made in his speech, that “those convicted of domestic violence abuse
against their girlfriend or boyfriend cannot buy a firearm, period.”
Biden said this in the context of bragging about (and exaggerating) what
the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) – a bill he signed
into law last year – accomplished in the way of gun control. Those
provisions, as CNN noted, are limited definitionally and expire five
years after the triggering conviction or the completion of any related
sentence, whichever comes later.

Likely, CNN’s editors tacked this one onto the original list of five
items to underscore to viewers the channel’s viewpoint that U.S. gun
control laws are still limited and full of “loopholes.” If that’s so,
NRA is pleased to take credit for its role in ensuring the limitations
CNN identified were part of the final law. Misdemeanor convictions like
those added as Second Amendment prohibitors under the BSCA have never
resulted in a permanent loss of civil rights in the American legal
tradition. The NRA therefore considers their use as a pretext to
permanently eliminate the right to keep and bear arms as illegitimate.
Congress made many mistakes with the BSCA, but it was right to ensure
these prohibitions were limited.

As this last example shows, NRA and CNN are not likely to achieve full
agreement on firearm issues anytime soon. Nevertheless, its reporting on
the Biden speech was a refreshing example of what is possible when the
outlet focuses on actual “news” and demands accountability even of
America’s Democrat officials. We will gladly give credit where it’s
due, should the outlet continue this practice.

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20230626/stop-the-presses-nra-and-cnn-agr
ee-joe-biden-lies-on-guns

[Joe Lyin' Biden]

A liar is worse than a thief.

When it comes to Joe Biden’s rambling, anti-gun speeches, sometimes he
seems just confused, and sometimes he mistakenly reveals his true agenda
of eradicating the Second Amendment and stripping virtually every law-
abiding American of their right to arms and self-defense.

But at this point in his term at the White House, actual lies are becoming
far more frequent and far more concerning.

On June 16, at the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Conn., Biden
spoke to a group of “gun control” activists, delivering a speech that
vacillated between confusing and borderline unintelligible (feel free to
try to follow his train of thought with this official transcript).

What was clear in the speech, however, was Biden’s willingness to make
things up, as it appears the legacy media is rarely willing to offer any
sort of a “fact-check” when he talks about guns. And we’re not just
talking about differences of opinion on firearm-related policy, subjective
interpretations of certain events, or carefully manipulated statistics to
support particular anti-gun views.

This speech had so much wrong with it that we may not be able to cover
everything, but here are some of the lowlights.

First, he began talking about the passage of the Bipartisan Safer
Communities Act (BSCA), the anti-gun law he signed last year.

Biden praised the $230 million that the law allows to be used to entice
states into enacting “red flag” firearm confiscation schemes, then
absurdly claimed his “son was the first to enforce (such laws) when he was
attorney general (of Delaware).” But his son, Beau Biden, was Delaware
attorney general from 2007-2015, and Delaware did not enact its “red flag”
law until 2018.

He also tried to imply that the illegal trafficking of firearms was not
illegal until enactment of the BSCA. While the Act does explicitly define
a federal standard, and penalties, for “trafficking in firearms” as such,
virtually every discrete act necessary to perpetrate an illegal firearm
trafficking conspiracy has been criminalized since the 1968 Gun Control
Act.

Biden further tried to claim that the BSCA made “straw purchases”—when one
buys a firearm for someone else who is prohibited by law from doing
so—illegal. Again, while “straw purchases” may not have been banned as
such under federal law, the act of purchasing a firearm for someone else
who is prohibited from purchasing one has been illegal for decades, as has
misrepresenting who the “actual buyer” of the firearm is.

In essence, any time you make a material misstatement when you purchase a
firearm from a licensed dealer—as the media is reporting the president’s
son, Hunter, has recently admitted doing—you have violated federal law and
can be subject to years in prison and substantial fines. While Hunter’s
offense would appear to have a potential 10-year sentence, media reports
indicate the Justice Department has offered him a plea deal that could
result in dismissal of the gun charge. So much for his dad’s tough talk
about illegal firearms.

In defending the need for the BSCA, Biden did what he regularly does, and
made a ridiculous claim unsupported by any facts:

“And in most cities — down in Philadelphia and New York, areas I know well
— like up here — you’d see a truck pull up, pull to the curb, and selling
weapons — selling guns, selling AR-15. Selling weapons.

“Well, guess what? You do that now, you go to jail.”

Sadly, Biden’s understanding as to how criminals operate appears to come
from movies, rather than real life, as the type of situation he described
could only be imagined by a Hollywood screenwriter. To date, no one has
corroborated Biden’s account of trucks selling AR-15s curbside in
America’s largest, most populated cities. Unlicensed firearms dealing was
illegal before the BSCA, and it still is.

Of course, Biden wasn’t done underscoring his anti-Second Amendment agenda
with his reference to the BSCA. He went on to rail against the long-
standing American tradition of law-abiding citizens completing their own,
customized firearms at home; claiming he “made it illegal to manufacture
so-called ‘ghost guns’” through an executive order. In fact, the order and
subsequent rulemaking, although overreaching in their own rights, did not
go this far.

He then went on to make arguably the most incoherent, nonsensical anti-gun
argument he has ever made as he tried to highlight another action he took
against handguns equipped with stabilizing braces:

“It made it harder for people to buy stabilized brief — braces. Put a
pistol on a brace, and it ma- — turns into a gun. Makes them where you
can have a higher-caliber weapon — a higher-caliber bullet coming out of
that gun.”

First, one puts a brace on a pistol, not the other way around. But since
the pistol is already a gun, is he saying attaching the brace somehow
transforms the brace into a gun? Perhaps this is Biden’s own imaginative
interpretation of the transitive property.

If A is a gun, but B is not a gun, but A+B is a gun, then B must be a gun
once added to A, even if you later subtract it?

Then there’s the nonsense about “a higher-caliber bullet coming out of
that gun.” Does Biden imagine that stabilizing braces have the magical
ability to transform the chamber and barrel of any handgun to which they
are attached? Because that is the only way that comment could possibly
make sense. If you put a stabilizing brace on a handgun chambered for
9mm, that handgun can still only fire 9mm ammunition. The same goes for
any caliber handgun on which you affix a stabilizing brace.

Then again, this is the same firearm “expert” who once proclaimed
legislation he supports “says there can be no more than eight bullets in a
round,” and told supporters at a campaign rally, “I believe in the Second
Amendment, but nobody says you can have a magazine with 100 clips in it.”

Again, we are not exaggerating when we say this was one of Biden’s most
confusing, unintelligible speeches on firearms he has ever given, and
we’ve left out quite a bit of the nonsense. Go read the transcript. Or,
just go to his closing, where he blurts out, “God save the Queen, man.”

We have no theory to explain what he meant by that apparent reference to a
deceased monarch. But it is emblematic of a man who is increasingly
detached from reality, reason, accountability, and shame, and never more
so than when is speaking about firearms.

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20230626/fabulist-in-chief-biden-lies-to-
anti-gun-crowd

[Disarming America]

The UN is a joke.

Late into the night on 9 June, 2023 the United Nation’s Open-Ended Working
Group on Conventional Ammunition (OEWG) concluded its development of a new
global framework to address existing gaps in through-life conventional
ammunition management despite the dissociation of the Russian Federation
and their bedfellows Belarus.

Created through General Assembly resolution purporting to address problems
arising from the accumulation of conventional ammunition stockpiles in
surplus, the OEWG wasted no time in expanding their work since it began in
February 2022. Under the guise of “through-life ammunition management”,
universal ammunition serialization, running hand and hand with user
registration, quickly became the OEWG’s end goal. This was evident when
the group was established and has continued throughout all four weeks of
their discussions, where even the word “stockpile” rarely got mentioned.
After all, even in the specious world of the UN, no-one could argue that a
global agreement telling countries to secure their national ammunition
stockpiles was necessary.

It is also why the OEWG has been deliberate in leaving any attempts to
define its key terms out of the final report. Similar to the dangers
associated with the United Nations’ refusal to define the term “end user”,
the OEWG’s purported focus, “conventional ammunition stockpiles”, remains
open to interpretation. This is not a mistake, as it leaves the door open
for arguments to be made that even a 25-round box of .22lr constitutes
one.

This is also why the work of this group is so concerning, and why NRA-ILA
has attended all of their meetings alongside a technical expert from the
Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturer’s Institute. Unfortunately,
global interest in the dangerous of this group have been minimal, at best,
with limited participation from industry and ammunition manufacturers
outside of our borders, culminating with zero attendance from any at this
final, and most critical of meetings.

Fortunately, an effective delegation from the United States was responsive
to many of our recommendations throughout the meetings and was successful
in their arguments to water down most of the most egregious provisions
contained in each of the five draft reports the OEWG produced. This
included removal of attempts to require “individual” end-user
certificates, ensuring any calls to regulate the undefined term
“stockpile” were limited to those held at the national level, and for
language requiring the marking (serialization) every round of ammunition
to be amended into simply something that should be “consider[ed]” for
ammunition under national ownership.

These were small victories for the entire international firearms
community; however, at the United Nations, this means little. Unlike our
Constitution, the framework that was produced this week is a living
document which, once adopted by the General Assembly later this year, can,
and will, be modified over time. Not only will work continue on further
restricting its terms during the official and perpetual future OEWG
meetings, but arguments will now be made for incorporation and expansion
of it and its terms into all of the other United Nations firearms
initiatives, including the Programme of Action, Firearms Protocol and Arms
Trade Treaty.

Rest assured that even though the global firearms community is largely
absent from this fight NRA-ILA recognizes its significance and we will
continue to battle to protect your rights in the international arena.

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20230612/united-nations-finalizes-plan-to-
regulate-ammunition

[Joe the liar]

Shows how ignorant Democrats are.

On June 22, the U.S. Senate voted on House Joint Resolution 44, which
sought to disapprove the Biden Administration’s pistol brace rule. While
the House passed H.J. Res. 44 on a bipartisan basis, the Senate’s vote
stuck straight to party lines, with the provision failing 49-50.

Clearly, Senate Democrat Leadership stood firm in its defense of Joe
Biden’s anti-Second Amendment agenda, making sure every member of its
caucus would toe the anti-gun line for the party’s professed “leader.”
Even the two most prominent Democrats in the Senate that occasionally vote
for the rights of law-abiding gun owners—Senators Joe Manchin (W.V.) and
Jon Tester (Mont.)—abandoned those innocently caught up in ATF’s pistol
brace about-face.

So much for the party of “criminal justice reform,” as the Democrats like
to market themselves. By changing a well-settled interpretation of the law
and applying it retroactively to individuals who obtained braced pistols
according to the rules as they were understood at the time, the ATF rule
basically manufactures criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.

The Senate vote effectively saves Joe Biden the embarrassment (and
accountability) of single-handedly rescuing ATF’s ill-considered rule with
a veto of H.J. Res. 44. NRA will, of course, continue to challenge the
rule through the courts.

In a twist of irony, the Senate’s vote comes the same week it is announced
that Biden’s own son, Hunter, has apparently made what looks to be a
sweetheart deal with Biden’s Department of Justice after being
investigated for lying on an ATF Form 4473 when purchasing a handgun in
2018. For all of the elder Biden’s tough talk about criminals and
firearms, it looks like his son will face virtually no significant
repercussion for what could otherwise have been several felony violations
of federal gun control laws.

As noted elsewhere in the Alert this week, this disparity of outcomes
isn’t a flaw with gun control among its supporters; it’s the point of it.

Should anyone be brought up on charges in the future for violating the new
rule—if it actually survives the numerous court cases that have been filed
against it--don’t expect anything less than jail time for the violator …
unless the person charged happens to be related to the “Big Guy.”

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20230626/bidens-unconstitutional-pistol-
brace-rule-fine-with-all-senate-democrats

[Dump Newsom]

Newsom needs his ass beat with broom handles until he has no skin
unbruised.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is presiding over a state in decline,
with violent crime rising in the state and once renowned cities like San
Francisco now cautionary tales of urban squalor. Residents and businesses
are fleeing locales that have all but abandoned the idea of law
enforcement, if not fleeing the state altogether.

But nothing succeeds in Newsom’s brand of politics like failure, and with
his sights set firmly on national office, the Golden State governor is now
receiving fawning attention in the mainstream press for an unserious
proposal to rewrite the Second Amendment. The “plan” would be to change
the current wording that protects what the U.S. Supreme Court has
characterized as a preexisting, fundamental right rooted in concepts of
self- and corporate defense into an affirmative grant of authority to the
U.S. government to restrict and impede gun ownership. The fact Newsom is
taking this tact to garner national attention for himself, however, may
say more than he or his supporters realize about how overreaching
California-style gun control already is.

It’s ironic that the U.S. Constitution and its constraints are suddenly of
interest to Newsom, especially when it comes to gun control. There is
precious little bad thinking in gun control that isn’t already binding law
in California. This includes versions of every item on Newsom’s list of
proposed changes, i.e., banning adults under age 21 from purchasing
firearms; banning private sales and transfers of firearms; a waiting
period for gun purchases; and banning “civilian” purchase of so-called
“assault weapons.” Newsom pitches these “ideas” by emphasizing (and
grossly exaggerating) their supposedly broad bi-partisan support. But they
remain the minority approach among U.S. states, and none of them (except
limitations on handgun purchases by young adults) are federal law.

Just how far Newsom would go with these proposals is unknown; there
appears to be no text of his amendments for public review. That alone
strongly indicates that publicity, not policy-making, is the real impetus
of his effort. But even from a policy-making standpoint, Newsom’s proposal
is incoherent.

First, as shown by the most exhaustive analysis of gun control’s
effectiveness to date – conducted by the non-partisan RAND Corporation –
none of these policies has “supportive” evidence for decreasing violent
crime or reducing firearm-related mortality.

Second, if the policies are as popular as he claims, the political process
itself should be enough to see them enshrined into law. Indeed, that has
been the case in California and in other states where anti-gun sentiment
prevails in the legislature. It’s also a fact that each item on this list
is perennial fodder for anti-gun bills introduced in the U.S. Congress.
Clearly, gun control supporters at all levels of government are already
convinced that nothing in the U.S. Constitution stands in the way of these
laws. No serious or well-informed person, in any case, believes an anti-
gun politician would forgo a politically feasible gun control win over
quibbles about its constitutionality. Yet if Congress won’t even pass
bills to enact these laws, who could believe both houses would vote by a
two-thirds margin to take the far more difficult, consequential, enduring,
and politically perilous step of supporting a constitutional amendment to
implement them? It is unpopularity, not reverence for the Constitution,
that dooms the items on Newsom’s list.

Third, even Newsom’s fellow travelers in the media who are happy to give
him national exposure and favorable coverage for his silly plan admit it
is all but hopeless. The antigun Los Angeles Times characterized it as “a
longshot proposal with little chance of passing in a nation deeply divided
on the issue.” As that outlet correctly notes, many states are not only
rejecting proposals like the ones on Newsom’s list, they are affirmatively
removing restrictions to favor the right to keep and bear arms.
Meanwhile, the generally pro-gun Republican Party wields control of 22
states, with the generally anti-gun Democrat Party dominant in 17 states.
For the amendment to arise from the states themselves, two-thirds would
have to support a call for a constitutional convention for that purpose.
And assuming Newsom’s proposal survived that convention intact, three-
quarters of the states would have to ratify it. That sort of state-
generated constitutional action has NEVER occurred on ANY issue during the
entire history of the U.S. It certainly won’t occur on one of the most
divisive issues in modern politics.

Finally, if Newsom really believes that the U.S. Constitution must be
amended to accommodate the four items on his list, then he is necessarily
admitting that existing laws to this effect are constitutionally void or
at least highly problematic. If that’s true, then the oath he took as
governor to support and defend the Constitution of the United States
should compel him to seek repeal of California’s own versions of those
laws or at least to withhold defense of them against court challenges. It
would also establish an extraordinary concurrence with the NRA’s own view
of those laws.

If, on the other hand, he believes those laws are valid, then he is being
nakedly political and insincere with his calls for a constitutional
amendment to enable them. That would establish the NRA’s own view that
Newsom’s “28th Amendment” effort is merely an expensive and time-wasting
“publicity stunt.”

It’s also important to understand that what Newsom is really proposing is
a fundamental constitutional revolution that would turn a constitutional
protection against government overreach into a tool for the government to
crack down on the people. That explains more about how Gavin Newsom
approaches governance than anything his critics could say.

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20230612/anti-gun-governor-grabs-
headlines-with-phony-insincere-proposal-to-amend-away-your-rights