On Monday, President Joe Biden reentered the debate about gun control.
He fielded questions about the horrific shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas… and he appears to have mixed up common handguns with the rifles used in Uvalde.
A reporter approached Biden outside Marine One to ask about reckoning with Republican approaches to gun safety.
According to the White House transcript, the reporter asked, “Sir, do you think there is anything different in how Republicans will approach the gun reform question now, given the circumstances?… Is there one element — is it aid, is it red flag, is it some component that you think could be most successful now?”
Biden responded with uncertainty… and with a characteristic gaffe.
He launched into a rant about handguns — instead of speaking about rifles, the kind of gun more relevant to the reporter’s question.
He said:
I don’t — I don’t know… I mean — and I’ll just conclude with this: Look, when I first started doing hearings on the issue of what rational gun laws should be, it was during a period when I was a senator and the death rate was going up. Not that many more people were being shot, but the death rate was up. And when I think of — I’m not sure, I think it was (inaudible) hospital in New York — whatever the largest trauma hospital is.
And I sat with a trauma doctor, and I asked him — I said, “What’s the difference? Why are so many people…” — and not that many more people were being shot. This is now 20 years ago, or 25 years. I said, “Why are they dying?” And they showed me x-rays. He 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. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.”
Biden was speaking about 9 mm bullets. However, critics on Twitter said that 9 mm rounds appear more often in common handguns than in the kind of rifle used in the Texas massacre.
The president appears to have wandered off topic, as he often does.
Biden garnered flack from critics on Twitter.
Congressional candidate Robby Starbuck, R-Tenn., described Biden’s story as “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.” Conservative commentator David Hookstead asked, “Will the fact checkers be flagging his comment as misinformation?”
One Twitter user responded to Biden’s story by posting an old picture of a comically large “9 mm” bullet.
Take a look —
A young Joe Biden standing next to the first 9mm bullet in the war of 1812 https://t.co/VzpnU1iHch pic.twitter.com/MY9tF679sI
— G (@stevensongs) May 30, 2022
"A 9MM bullet blows the lung out of the body" has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. Joe Biden is an imbecile. Why do the people who know the least about guns want to yap their gums the most about guns? What part of "Shall NOT be infringed" do they not get? pic.twitter.com/sWUqxdNYEn
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) May 30, 2022
Biden also alleged that the Second Amendment prohibits the purchase of cannons
He made a similar comment in April while announcing the Justice Department’s plan to combat the circulation of unregistered guns. “You couldn’t buy a cannon when, in fact, the Second Amendment passed,” he said at a press conference.
PolitiFact rated the claim as false.
“The Second Amendment did not place limits on individual ownership of cannons,” the fact-checker wrote. “Biden has made this False statement before.”
Biden also spoke about 9 mm rounds on the campaign trail for president. However, that time, he correctly characterized the weapons as “pistols.”
“Why should we allow people to have military-style weapons including pistols with 9mm bullets and can hold 10 or more rounds?” Biden said in 2019, according to The Seattle Times.
The Horn editorial team