What Joe Doesn’t Know

I s the president okay? Besides the usual misstatements and the senior moments — things we’re not supposed to notice or comment upon — Joe Biden is having a weird one.

On the occasion of announcing a suite of proposals to tackle gun crime and rising violence in our cities, Joe Biden gave a short, halting soliloquy Wednesday in which he took it upon himself to pick a fight with Thomas Jefferson, effectively challenged the most paranoid members of the militia movements to arm up and “bring it,” and subtly invoked the tradition of governments disarming categories of people they found obnoxious. Just try to soak it all in.

Those who say the blood of Patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government. Well the tree of liberty is not watered by the blood of Patriots, what’s happened is that there never been . . . if you want and think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons. The point is there has always been the ability to limit — rationally limit — the type of weapon that could be owned, and who could own it.

Let’s take this on, working backward. The Second Amendment was put into the Bill of Rights precisely to restrict the government from the ability to rationally limit who could own a weapon. The religious wars in England led to successive attempts by Catholics and Protestants to disarm each other. James II tried to disarm Protestants. When he was overthrown, the subsequent English Bill of Rights enshrined “that the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” Penal laws passed by the English Parliament in the decades after 1695 forbade Catholics and Presbyterians (Dissenters) from possessing firearms. In America, following on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment clearly had no religious qualification.

Gun-control laws in America have been similarly motivated by the fear of politically aggrieved minorities. Governor Ronald Reagan signed into law California’s Mulford Act, which restricted the carrying of loaded arms in public, clearly a response to the demonstrations of Black Panthers. These English and American attempts at discriminating who could possess weapons are “rational” limits, according to a certain definition.

Joe Biden has used this line about F-15s and nuclear weapons before. It remains pretty stupid. You know who doesn’t have either F-15s or nuclear weapons? The Taliban. And yet, despite 20 years of embarrassing efforts, they managed to use Kalashnikovs and even bolt-action rifles to drive away a modern military. I’ll do the Internet columnist’s trick and quote myself: “If the U.S. government (and the American people behind them) doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons on foreign fundamentalists in Afghanistan, why does anyone presume they’d use them against Americans in Idaho?” It’s downright weird that Biden can be simultaneously anxious to withdraw from the fire of Afghan Bubbas, and yet be so confident in overmatching Americans.

That an armed populace is a prophylactic against tyranny is precisely why governments have tried to prevent the groups they sought to tyrannize from being armed: A section of the citizenry can, with sufficient will and the moral support of the surrounding population, almost always raise the price of political domination to levels almost no government wants to pay. The genius of the Second Amendment is that both factors must be in play. A single man in a strange religious cult can be overwhelmed in a standoff. But an armed militia that has a plausible claim to justice and the support of the locals will be a fearsome enemy. This is how anti-colonialist movements from Ireland to Algeria won their political independence.

It’s also weird for Biden to be talking up the futility of armed resistance to tyranny, when on other days he refers to the riotous events at the Capitol on January 6 as “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” or “an existential crisis — a test of whether our democracy could survive.” F-15s not needed, nor even small arms.

But then again, irrationality is the order of the day. The focus on gun control is perpetually on guns or features that rarely figure into the vast majority of crimes: AR-15 rifles, “ghost guns,” silencers, or “barrel shrouds.” Weirdly, it’s as if the focus of gun controllers isn’t even on disarming criminals — but on disarming the law-abiding people who have rifles that are employed only for sport and self-defense.

The president cannot be bothered with the details of our crime problem. He can’t be bothered to think through his decades-old rhetoric, nor understand the ugly history behind ambitions like his own. And yet, for some reason, we’re all here listening to him rambling about deer in Kevlar vests and referring to the “AFT.”