Biden Repeats Previous False Claim About Muzzle Velocity of An AR-15 Bullet

Biden Repeats Previous False Claim About Muzzle Velocity of An AR-15 Bullet


President Joe Biden’s crusade against America’s most popular sporting and self-defense rifle is continuing with one of the same false claims he has made in the past.

On Friday, in a speech to the National Education Association teachers union, Biden repeated a previous statement that a bullet fired from an AR-15 travels five times faster than it actually does.

Many rifles and even some pistols fire rounds faster than the 2,700-3,100 feet per second of AR-15 rifles.

“The speed of the bullet is five times that that comes out of the muzzle of most weapons,” Biden said, describing the popular rifle as a “weapon of war,” according to The Daily Wire.

While some mass shooters choose AR-15s to commit their crimes, the vast majority of murders are committed with handguns.

What’s more, those who support bans on AR-15 and AK-47-style rifles describe them as “assault weapons,” but there is no technical definition for the term, The Daily Wire added.

Biden has made previously false claims about the history and genesis of the Second Amendment.

“And I might add: 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 in May. “You couldn’t buy a cannon.”

Historians countered that, in fact, there was no truth to the claim.

On his blog Sunday, Georgetown University Law School professor and noted constitutional expert Jonathan Turley noted Biden’s continual erroneous claims about the AR-15’s muzzle velocity:

We have previously discussed dubious constitutional and historical claims by President Joe Biden on gun bans. However, on Friday, he returned to a curious claim that he has made repeatedly: that “the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun.” Conservative and gun rights publications have repeatedly shot down that claim but it does not seem to have any impact.  As with Biden’s false claim that certain weapons were banned from private ownership at the ratification of the Second Amendment, the President continues to make the same false claim on velocity speed.

Previously, Turley noted that those pushing for bans of ‘assault weapons’ are pursuing a constitutionally questionable political and legislative strategy. In May, he wrote that banning only certain weapons would be problematic for courts if they are determined to be no more powerful than other types of firearms.

“There are good-faith arguments for gun control, including arguments that the Second Amendment does not create an individual right to bear arms,” Turley noted. “We should continue to have that worthy debate but we should follow the rule of the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan that ‘everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’”

The Biden administration as well as congressional Democrats have made reinstituting an assault weapons ban a priority, though the ban that expired in 2004 did not have any appreciable effect on reducing the murder rate, previous studies have found.


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