President Joe Biden claimed Tuesday that Americans aren’t allowed to own a machine gun or a flamethrower. But that’s not true in most of the country.
Biden made the claim while delivering a plea for a renewed ban on semi-automatic “assault weapons” in the wake of a massacre on Monday at a Christian elementary school in Nashville.
Biden said: “I’m a Second Amendment guy. I have two shotguns. My sons have shotguns. You know, but our states – you know, everybody thinks somehow the Second Amendment is absolute. You’re not allowed to go out and own a – an automatic weapon. You’re not allowed to own a machine gun. You’re not allowed to own a flamethrower.”
Facts First: Biden’s claims are inaccurate with regard to most Americans. People are allowed to own and buy flamethrowers almost everywhere in the country; flamethrowers are not restricted by federal firearms law, and only one state bans possession of them. And with some exceptions, people in more than two-thirds of states are allowed to own and buy fully automatic machine guns as long as those guns were legally registered and possessed prior to May 19, 1986. There were more than 700,000 legally registered machine guns in the US as of May 2021, according to official federal data.
Asked for comment, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in an email: “His point is that virtually everyone accepts that there are some weapons civilians should not be allowed to own, and that, as he is, you can be a Second Amendment supporter and also passionately believe in an assault weapons ban.”
Contrary to Biden’s unequivocal declaration about flamethrowers on Tuesday, and a similar claim from Biden in a CNN interview in 2019, people in almost every state are allowed to possess these incendiary devices.
Flamethrowers, which project a stream of fire, are best known for…
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