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President Joe Biden holds pieces of a 9mm pistol as he speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 11. (AP) President Joe Biden holds pieces of a 9mm pistol as he speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 11. (AP)

President Joe Biden holds pieces of a 9mm pistol as he speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 11. (AP)

Yacob Reyes
By Yacob Reyes April 12, 2022

Joe Biden recycles false claim that the Second Amendment limited gun ownership

If Your Time is short

  • The Second Amendment did not place limits on individual ownership of cannons.

  • Federal gun regulation came decades after the amendment passed.

  • Biden has made this False statement before.

See the sources for this fact-check

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. 

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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 Second Amendment did not place limits on individual ownership of cannons.
 
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."
 
Though the rights endowed in the amendment are a point of contention for most Americans, the U.S. Supreme Court has maintained that it does confer an individual’s right to bear arms.
 
"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.
 
The White House did not return PolitiFact’s request for comment. 
 
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. 
 
For Biden, the third time isn’t the charm. We rate this claim False.

Read About Our Process

The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter

Our Sources

Email interview with David Kopel, the research director and Second Amendment project director at the Independence Institute, April 12, 2022

White House Briefing Room, Remarks by President Biden Announcing Actions to Fight Gun Crime, April 11, 2022

White House Briefing Room, The Biden Administration Cracks Down on Ghost Guns, April 11, 2022

PolitiFact, Joe Biden’s dubious claim about Revolutionary War cannon ownership, June 29, 2020

PolitiFact, Joe Biden gets history wrong on the Second Amendment limiting gun ownership, June 25, 2021

The Washington Post, Biden’s false claim that the 2nd Amendment bans cannon ownership, June 28, 2021

National Archives, The Bill of Rights: A Transcription, accessed April 12, 20212

Oyez, D.C. vs. Heller, June 26, 2008

U.S. Government Printing Office, National Firearms Act - House Ways and Means Committee hearings, April-May, 1934

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