Tipsheet

Biden Accidentally Explains Exactly Why We Need the Second Amendment

The right to keep and bear arms was established so Americans had the ability to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. They knew a power-hungry government would first unarm its citizens to make them helpless and unable to fight back. It's why our Founding Fathers established the Second Amendment. They wanted to make sure that could never happen in America.

In fact, Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." 

It's a quote that former Vice President Joe Biden loves to implement before stomping all over Americans' desires to own firearms for self-protection or, Heaven forbid, a tyrannical government. 

"Those who say 'the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots'–  a great line. Well, guess what? The fact is if you’re going to take on the government you need an F-15 with Hellfire missiles. There is no way an AK-47 is going to take care of you if you're worried about the government knocking down your door," Biden told a group of supporters in New Hampshire on Sunday. "And so, it's bizarre. We never said you could own any weapon at all from the beginning. You can't own a machine gun. You can't own a bazooka. You can't own an M1 tank, no matter how much money you have. You can limit the kind of weapons that can be owned."

"I think – and by the way, all the work I've done on this, including in [the Obama] administration – I now have over 58 percent of the NRA members acknowledging you can't own an assault weapon," he said. "There's no need for it. You can't have, you can't have a magazine that has more than 10 rounds in it."

Biden is the perfect example of why the Second Amendment exists. Saying Americans shouldn't own specific firearms because they'd never be able to compete with the government is precisely why each and every one of us should have access to the same weapons as the military. 

Anti-gunners continually quote so-called NRA members as people who support them, especially on things like universal background checks and so-called "assault weapons." People like Biden don't understand how firearms work. They label something an assault rifle because it has a collapsible stock or a pistol grip. The guns they give these ridiculous labels to aren't any more lethal. They're still semi-automatic, meaning one round is fired for one pull of the trigger. They're not fully automatic (commonly referred to as machine guns), where you can hold down the trigger and the gun will fire until no more ammo is in the magazine.

Which leads me to my next point: if politicians want to launch an all-out assault on firearms and the men and women who rely on them for protection and hunting, they should have to be able to answer these three questions: