During his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Joe Biden repeated so many half-truths and outright lies that fact-checkers were having trouble keeping up. One of the most egregious, the most oft-repeated, is the one about gun manufacturers enjoying immunity from lawsuits. Said Biden:
Look, repeal the liability shield. It makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued, the only one.
Liberal outlet AP was surprisingly blunt:
That’s false. While gun manufacturers do have legal protections from being held liable for injuries caused by criminal misuse of their weapons, thanks to the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), they are not exempt or immune from being sued [for other reasons].
Those “other reasons” include being held liable for defects in the design of a firearm, manufacturing defects, negligence, breach of contract, or breach of warranty. But when it comes to frivolous lawsuits brought with the intent of destroying the industry itself by forcing gun makers to defend themselves — death “by a thousand cuts” — Congress, during a more reasonable period in history, passed a bill signed into law by then-President George Bush to protect the industry from those lawsuits.
The law itself states:
Businesses in the United States that are engaged in … [the] sale to the public of firearms … are not, and should not, be liable for the harm caused by those who criminally or unlawfully misuse [them].
This is the same protection afforded other businesses, such as automakers being sued by victims of a drunk driver using one of their products. They simply cannot be held liable for the actions of customers misusing their products.
The lie spouted by Biden on Tuesday night was too much even for the liberal, anti-gun Washington Post:
Biden’s language is too sweeping. Gun manufacturers can certainly be sued. The 2005 law does not guarantee blanket immunity. Few industries have federal liability immunity, but Biden is wrong to say gun manufacturers are alone.
A statement attributed to Nazi criminal Joseph Goebbels is that a lie, repeated often enough, will over time become truth: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”
Biden’s speechwriters and handlers cannot claim ignorance, for they have allowed and directed their puppet to repeat the lie endlessly. On February 3 Biden spoke to a Gun Violence Prevention Task Force meeting in New York City, where he repeated the canard, almost word-for-word: “Imagine had we had a liability [law in place that allowed users to bring frivolous lawsuits against gun makers] — they’re the only industry in America that is exempted from being able to be sued by the public. The only one.”
And even last April, while laying out his attack against guns during a White House briefing, Biden said: “The only industry in America, a billion-dollar industry, that can’t be sued, are gun manufacturers.”
Biden and his handlers are fighting an uphill battle. The American people are moving away from enacting more gun laws as a way to curb violent crime while they continue to purchase firearms at a record pace. Biden also is facing the obvious contradiction of Ukraine, where individual citizens are using privately held firearms to hold off the Russian invasion while he is promoting moves to disarm Americans. As Larry Keane, a writer for the National Shooting Sports Federation (NSSF) noted: “The duplicity [of Biden] denying gun rights to American citizens and lauding the bravery of Ukrainians defending their homeland [with arms] is staggering.”
Biden’s strategy is not working. In fact, the expectation that repetition of a lie would eventually cause it to be considered true is having the opposite effect: Biden, who repeats the lie over and over, is increasingly being viewed as a liar, and being dismissed as merely a mouthpiece for those behind the scenes working to disarm America.
