In his 2023 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden (D) repeated his favorite attack on our Second Amendment freedom.
“Ban assault weapons now! Ban them now, once and for all,” said Biden. The president’s Twitter account also tweeted at the same time: “Let’s ban assault weapons again.”
If it seems like Biden has said this before, that’s because he has, on numerous occasions, including last year’s State of the Union address. A quick Twitter search shows that Biden has tweeted this desire dozens of times since entering office.
We know that “assault weapons” is a politically invented term designed to mean whatever gun-controllers like Biden want. The U.S. Supreme Court also affirmed in Heller (2008) that firearms in common use are protected under the safeguard of the Second Amendment. As there are estimated to be more than 24 million semi-automatic rifles in circulation that are patterned after the AR-15—not to mention the millions of other rifles, pistols and shotguns that Biden would categorize as “assault weapons”—they are clearly constitutionally protected.
The president also invoked the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which was later found to have had little to no effect on crime by a congressionally mandated study.
Biden’s desire to ban tens-of-millions of rifles, pistols and shotguns isn’t as popular as his White House staff might like; in fact, recent polls show more people oppose an “assault weapons ban” than favor it. “Among other issues, while Biden is calling on Congress to renew the long-expired ban on assault weapons, the public now is divided on the question: Forty-seven percent support such a ban, 51 percent oppose it,” said the poll results.
Perhaps this increasingly unpopular agenda is also why Biden didn’t mention a single item from the list of demands recently put in front of him by anti-gun groups.
Biden’s most-recent State of the Union was more of the same, as was his previous one, and as will likely be his next one. It is up to freedom-loving Americans to continue the fight to push back against the Biden’s overreaching, unconstitutional agenda.
