President Biden unveiled executive orders on gun control on Thursday, at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden.
“Nothing I’m about to recommend in any way impinges on the Second Amendment,” Biden said. “They’re phony arguments suggesting that these are Second Amendment rights in what we’re talking about.”
Biden added that “no amendment to the Constitution is absolute. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater and call it freedom of speech.
From the very beginning, you couldn’t own any weapon you wanted to own. From the very beginning of the Second Amendment existed, certain people weren’t allowed to have weapons.”
The Biden administration announced six actions to spur various gun control initiatives, which the White House described in a fact sheet.
The Justice Department will propose a rule to curb proliferation of “ghost guns,” or guns that are assembled at home through kits or a 3-D printer, and will issue yearly reports on firearms trafficking, among other initiatives.
Biden will also nominate David Chipman to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. A former SWAT agent with the bureau, Chipman is a gun control advocate and adviser to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s gun control organization.
Chipman claimed in a Reddit post last year that members of the Branch Dividian religious cult shot down two Texas National Guard helicopters during the 1993 siege at Waco, Texas. While members of the cult did in fact shoot at the helicopters, none were shot down.
