President Joe Biden’s plan to curb rising violence relies on several steps: more aid to local police departments, expanding job programs for young adults, more violence intervention programs, and tougher measures to shut down gun sellers who break federal laws.
"Rogue gun dealers feel like they can get away with selling guns to people who aren’t legally allowed to own them," Biden said June 23. "There has always been the ability to limit — rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it."
And, Biden said, that power was rooted in history.
"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," Biden said. "You couldn’t buy a cannon."
We reached out to the White House and received no comment, but Biden’s statement is not accurate history.
During the campaign, Biden made a similar claim about cannons in the Revolutionary War and who could own them. We rated that False.
This time, on top of that, Biden misrepresents what the Second Amendment says.
Second Amendment places no limits, experts sayThe text of the Second Amendment is short: "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."
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds said the amendment’s few words speak for themselves.
"The Second Amendment places no limits on individual ownership of cannon, or any other arms," Reynolds said.
There have been many court cases to resolve whether the amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it does.
Setting aside ongoing disagreements over that ruling, Fordham University law professor Nicholas Johnson said, "The amendment limited government action, not people."
"The first federal gun control law does not appear until the 20th century," Johnson said.
That law, the National Firearms Act, came in 1934 when machine guns were the weapon of choice of Prohibition Era gangsters. (The law was drafted before Prohibition ended in 1933.) When U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings made the case for the law before the House Ways and Means Committee, he based it on the government’s power to tax and regulate interstate commerce, not the Second Amendment.