Yesterday PJ Media posted an article about the claim made by some Republicans that the Biden administration wants to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. Politifact claims that the charge that the Biden administration wants to ban handguns is false, but President Biden’s words do not back up that claim.
The article at PJ Media includes a Tweet and a video with the following statement:
President Biden says he wants to ban handguns.
The article details what followed:
In response to the tweet from House Republicans declaring that Biden “says he wants to ban handguns,” PolitiFact claims “the clip doesn’t back up the GOP tweet, and the full transcript goes further to sink this claim.”
PolitiFact claims that the numbers cited by Biden “apply to assault-style firearms and high-capacity magazines. As recently as June, when Biden rolled out his strategy to bring down murders, he said he wants to ban both.”
“Experts disagree over what is or isn’t an assault weapon. States set different thresholds for what qualifies as a high-capacity magazine,” PolitiFact continued, before adding, “But regardless of the definition, neither term includes all handguns.”
Did anyone say Biden wants to ban all handguns? Nope. Yet, PolitiFact unwittingly admitted in its analysis that some handguns would be affected by Biden’s gun control proposal. So, does Biden want to ban handguns? He’s publicly indicated that he wants to ban some. There’s no doubt about that.
Yet, PolitiFact rated the claim that Biden wants to ban handguns as “False.” In fairness, they could have gotten away with rating the claim “Half True” because one could argue that the House GOP’s wording wasn’t clear, but they didn’t take Biden’s words out of context. They even showed the video of Biden’s response to the question. Biden may not have said he wanted to ban all handguns, but he clearly said he wants to ban some. Yet, PolitiFact disingenuously rated the claim false, which seems to imply that Biden never said he wanted to ban any handguns at all.
Notice how Politifact changed the words slightly so that they could claim the statement was false. Unfortunately, the mainstream media does a lot of that. Whenever you read a mainstream media article, you have to read every word. Things are not always what they seem.