Fact Check: Biden Repeats Claim People Couldn’t Own Cannons When 2nd Amendment Was Passed

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on May 31, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

President Joe Biden has again repeated a gun-control talking point that has been fact-checked several times over the years.

Speaking to reporters this week, Biden said that Second Amendment didn’t allow for private ownership of cannons when it was adopted in the Bill of Rights.

“The Second Amendment was never absolute,” he said, according to a transcript released by the White House. “You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons.”

According to the text of the Second Amendment, “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.”

Both the Washington Post and Politifact have previously rated that cannon claim as false. In June 2021, Biden made the claim. Biden has made the statement that private citizens couldn’t own cannons numerous times over the years.

“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 at the time. “You couldn’t buy a cannon.”

The Post, in a rare fact check of Biden, quoted a Second Amendment researcher as saying that Biden’s comment about cannons at the time was false.

“Everything in that statement is wrong,” David Kopel, the research director and Second Amendment project director at the Independence Institute, told the paper. After 1791, when the Bill of Rights was adopted, “there were no federal laws about the type of gun you could own, and no states limited the kind of gun you could own,” he said.

And in 2020, Politifact rated a comment by then-candidate Biden that a private individual couldn’t own a cannon during the Revolutionary War as incorrect.

“The campaign was unable to come up with an example of a law banning private ownership of cannons, and historians of the period doubt that any existed. To the contrary, there are documented instances of privateers, or privately owned vessels, setting sail with cannons during the period,” the site said. “We rate the statement False.”

Biden also drew controversy Monday when he told reporters that a 9mm round, which is one of the most common rounds and is generally used in pistols, “blows a lung out of the body” in reference to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The killer in that shooting, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, used an AR-15 rifle, and officials have told local media that he used .223 rounds.