President Joe Biden’s claim that AR-15s fire bullets at a velocity that is five times higher than that of other guns is being shot down by people who know guns.
Biden repeated the claim Friday in a speech to the National Education Association teachers union, even though it has been repeatedly debunked. Several rifles and even some handguns fire bullets at a higher velocity than the 2,700-3,100 feet per second of AR-15s.
“The speed of the bullet is five times that that comes out of the muzzle of most weapons,” Biden said, describing the popular hunting rifle as a “weapon of war.”
Although some mass shooters, including the Uvalde and Buffalo killers from earlier this year, have used AR-15-style rifles, most murders are committed with handguns. Advocates of more restrictive gun control laws describe AR-15s and AK-47s as “assault rifles,” although there is no technical definition for the term.
Biden has often repeated the claim that AR-15s shoot bullets at higher velocities than other guns. Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that Biden had “bungled the statistic” after he made the same claim in late August.
“Biden was clearly wrong in his statement this week,” the Post wrote.
Biden has made other false claims about guns and the Second Amendment. In May of this year, he claimed that when the Second Amendment was enacted, it did not allow people to possess certain weapons.
“And I might add: 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,” he said. “You couldn’t buy a cannon.”
Historians pointed out that there was no truth to the claim.
AR-15s do fire bullets at high velocities, but nowhere near what Biden claimed, according to ballistics experts. When they exit the barrel, AR-15 bullets are traveling at about twice the speed of bullets fired from a typical handgun.
The White House is pushing hard for new gun control measures ahead of the midterm elections. Vice President Kamala Harris called for a ban on assault rifles.
“Do you know what an assault weapon is?” Harris said in May. “It was designed for a specific purpose, to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war, with no place, no place in a civil society.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote on his blog that banning one particular type of gun would be problematic for courts if it cannot be established that the particular gun is no more powerful than others.
“There are good-faith arguments for gun control, including arguments that the Second Amendment does not create an individual right to bear arms,” Turley wrote. “We should continue to have that worthy debate but we should follow the rule of the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan that ‘everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’”
Post a Comment