As is so often the case after high-profile incidents involving the criminal misuse of firearms, a lot of gun control activists immediately took to the internet with their “hot takes,” declining to wait for correct information to come to light or to analyze whether their initial gut feelings had any relationship to reality.

And, as usual, many of these immediate hot takes really missed the mark. Here are three of the most common assertions erroneously made in the days following the second known attempt to assassinate Trump.

1. This happened because of “weak” gun laws.

Right on cue, many major gun control organizations insinuated that “weak gun laws” were to blame not only for the assassination attempt but basically for all social ills.

As with the first assassination attempt on Trump, these groups made no effort to explain which of their much-touted “stronger” gun laws, specifically, would’ve prevented this individual from committing this specific criminal act, or how.

Since he is 58 years old, the second gunman’s actions certainly wouldn’t have been hindered by age-based restrictions on gun sales.

Nor was the gunman’s attempt to kill Trump facilitated by Florida’s recent change to its permitless public carry law, which (to the chagrin of gun control activists hoping to place as many barriers as possible between ordinary Americans and their rights) authorizes all non-prohibited adults to carry concealed handguns in public after first obtaining special licenses.

Not only was the gunman a convicted felon who couldn’t lawfully possess any firearm, much less carry one in public, but Florida law continues to prohibit the open carrying of long guns in public places.

Moreover, no reasonable person believes that a highly motivated criminal willing to commit premeditated murder with an illegally possessed rifle would have been dissuaded from doing so just because of public carry restrictions.

Moreover, as with the first gunman who attempted to assassinate Trump (at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania), there’s no evidence that Florida’s supposedly lax public carry laws confused Trump’s security detail or led it initially to downplay the severity of the threat posed by a rifle-wielding man setting up a sniper’s nest several hundred yards from a former president and current presidential candidate.

Looking at the standard “wish list” of laws supported by gun control activists, the only proposal that might plausibly come into play is their desire to eliminate private intrastate gun sales—i.e., “universal background checks.” For several reasons, however, it seems unlikely that a federal version of that law would have mattered.

It’s not yet clear precisely when or how the gunman in Florida got his rifle. But since he’d been a prohibited person for more than two decades, we can safely assume he didn’t buy it from a licensed seller within the past 20 years.

Several other possibilities remain. He may have lawfully purchased the rifle prior to becoming a prohibited person and illegally retained possession of it. That would hardly be surprising, as even states such as California—with their universal gun registration laws—struggle to confiscate guns from tens of thousands of prohibited persons whom officials know failed to surrender their previously lawfully possessed guns.

In theory, the gunman also could have purchased the rifle via a private intrastate sale by an unlicensed seller who acted in good faith, not knowing the buyer’s status as a prohibited person.

Such a sale still would have been completely illegal on the gunman’s part. It also would mean that he most likely kept the rifle stored somewhere (or with someone) in North Carolina after moving to Hawaii. Taking it back-and-forth from one of the nation’s most restrictive gun states would’ve required him to formally declare the rifle with an airline, an incredibly high-risk move for a convicted felon.

To be even quasi-legal, such a private gun sale also must have occurred prior to 2018, when the gunman moved to a state that effectively bans private sales.

In fact, if the gunman took possession of the rifle within the past six years, it by definition was through an illegal sale. No, he couldn’t just bypass Hawaii’s de facto prohibition on private sales by buying a gun in another state—at least not legally. Interstate sales must be conducted by licensed sellers, who are legally obligated to conduct background checks and ensure a sale complies with all laws of the buyer’s state of residency.

Most likely, however, the gunman either bought the rifle “off the street” in an illicit, black-market transaction with a seller who knew or didn’t care whether he was a prohibited person or he obtained it through an illegal straw purchaser.

Authorities said the serial number on the gunman’s rifle had been obliterated, an illegal technique commonly employed by black-market dealers and straw purchasers because it significantly hinders the ability of law enforcement to trace the weapon back to its last transaction through a federal firearms licensee—and thereby potentially work out a chain of custody that could incriminate the dealer or straw purchaser.

Finally, even if the gunman got his rifle through an otherwise lawful private sale, it’s quite the stretch to suggest that he could not just as easily have gotten it the same way as the vast majority of criminals—illegal black-market sales by people lacking any motivation or incentive to abide by federal gun sale laws.

2. The gunman used an “assault-style” AK-47 rifle.

Perhaps one of the most commonly repeated gun control talking points is that the gunman in Florida used an “assault weapon,” allegedly demonstrating why we should ban these firearms.

To be fair, this seems to stem from the fact that many major media outlets repeatedly have mischaracterized the gunman’s SKS rifle as an “AK-47” or “AK-style” gun, likely due to ignorance.

Based on photos released by law enforcement and other official documents, the rifle at issue seems to be a semiautomatic SKS platform that’s been mildly “sporterized” from its original World War II-era design. The most notable modifications were replacing the straight stock with what appears to be an Anschutz grip and substituting the internal box magazine for a detachable one.

The differences between an SKS platform and AK platform are more than just technical specifics or mere semantics.

For purposes of the “assault weapons” debate, the differences are inherently legal.

Typically, the statutory distinction between a prohibited “assault weapon” and its “non-assault counterpart” is the presence of one or more specific “military-style” features, such as a collapsing stock, barrel shroud, pistol grip, or vertical foregrip. Although an AK platform utilizes a pistol grip (rendering it, for statutory and “visual” purposes, an “assault weapon”), the gunman’s SKS-platform bears none of these prohibited features.

To the extent the rifle qualifies as an “assault weapon” under any current state law, it’s only because some states (such as California and Illinois) also prohibit hundreds of specific semiautomatic rifle models for seemingly arbitrary reasons, regardless of whether they otherwise meet the quasi-objective “feature-based” definition.

Even in those states, the SKS is considered a perfectly lawful “nonassault” weapon as long as it utilizes a “fixed magazine” instead of a detachable one, even though internal box magazines may be reloaded with stripper clips just as easily as empty detachable magazines may be replaced with fully loaded ones.

Not that any of these distinctions are relevant in the context of rendering the rifle “less lethal” or less capable of being used to kill at a distance. Consider that the bolt-action rifle used to kill President John F. Kennedy ironically would not be considered a “military-style” assault weapon by modern gun control activists despite having been literally designed for and used by the Italian army.

3. Blame Trump—he’s the one who made it easier for crazy people to get guns.

As just one example, in a viral post on X one major left-leaning account reasoned: “Here’s irony for you. Trump ended laws preventing the mentally ill from owning guns. This is the second attempt where a mentally ill person with a gun tried to assassinate him.”

You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that none of this is true.

First, Trump never “ended laws preventing the mentally ill from owning guns.” Presumably, this poster and others are referring to Trump’s role in rescinding a highly controversial, Obama-era administrative rule promulgated by the Social Security Administration.

That rule, which went into effect just days before Trump took office in 2017, required the agency to report to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System as “prohibited persons” anyone using a representative payee to help manage disability benefits.

As a result, an estimated 75,000 Americans would be stripped of their Second Amendment rights without the slightest bit of due process—no hearings, no individual medical assessments declaring them dangerous, and no opportunity for rebuttal. Worse, at the time these individuals requested or were assigned representative payees, none of them had any reason to believe the decision would dramatically affect their right to keep and bear arms.

The Obama administration rule was staunchly opposed not just by pro-gun groups, but by dozens of national organizations that traditionally have supported greater restrictions on the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, denounced the rule as lacking any basis in reliable evidence or solid data, particularly with respect to whether those whose rights were stripped had any increased propensity toward violence.

As president, Trump didn’t unilaterally rescind the rule, which he doubtless could have done. Instead, he signed legislation passed by Congress with bipartisan support that prohibited the Social Security Administration from reporting recipients to the background check system as mentally unfit merely because they had a representative payee.

The unpopular and unconstitutional nature of the rule notwithstanding, there’s absolutely no evidence that either gunman accused of trying to assassinate Trump ever received disability payments, much less required a representative payee to manage those benefits such that the rule plausibly would have resulted in their being reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS.

To the extent there’s any irony to these viral claims, it’s not based either on the gunman’s mental state or Trump’s role in overriding a controversial administrative rule with limited reach. No, the irony is that the second suspected gunman is a convicted felon whose name was already on the NICS list of prohibited persons when the Obama-era rule took effect, and he remained a prohibited person even after Congress overrode it.

In conclusion, there’s truly nothing new under the sun when it comes to gun control activists in the wake of concerning national headlines. They’ll say just about anything to cast the blame on lawful gun owners and insist that our rights be restricted further, regardless of how little capacity their laws actually have to render us all safer.

Their proposed laws certainly wouldn’t have made a difference for Donald Trump.

For many American gun owners, these speeches on preventing gun violence so obviously have become stump speeches for gun control that they no longer tune in, unable to bear cringey zingers about “deer in Kevlar vests” and blatantly false “gun facts.”

But don’t worry—I listened to the president’s Aug. 30 speech so that you didn’t have to. Here are the top 5 most unserious things Biden said about guns and the Second Amendment:

1. “Right now you can’t go on [sic] and buy an automatic weapon. You can’t go out and buy a cannon.”

Biden has made some variation of this assertion numerous times since taking office as president, and every time it has been roundly debunked by fact-checkers.

Private cannon ownership apparently was so widespread that one of the first types of “gun control” laws implemented in the early 1800s by some towns was a prohibition on firing one’s cannon inside city limits during certain times or without permission.

Today, it’s still not uncommon for civilians to own heavy ordnance, including 18th-century cannons and their modern equivalents. In fact, civilians even may buy tanks and other tactical military vehicles if they can afford the steep price tags. (But fair warning to would-be tank owners: Many places won’t consider your tank “street legal,” and you’ll be able to drive it only on private property.)

It’s also simply not true that civilians can’t legally buy machine guns today. These firearms are subject to special taxing and registration provisions under the National Firearms Act, and the Firearm Owners Protection Act prohibits civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after 1986. Nevertheless, over 700,000 of them currently are registered to American civilians.

2. “Do you realize the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun, five times lighter and can pierce Kevlar?”

A simple internet search by an intern could have told the president that this statement about an AR-15’s muzzle velocity and weight was laughably false.

Although a .223/5.56 bullet—the most common caliber for an AR-15 platform—is certainly among the lighter and faster of rifle rounds, it’s not even close to the lightest or fastest, much less five times faster or lighter.

Several important factors will affect muzzle velocity, including the weight of the bullet (also known as the bullet’s “grain”) and the length of the barrel from which it is fired. A typical .223/5.56 round fired from an AR-15 with a standard 16- to 20-inch barrel generally will have a muzzle velocity between 2,800 and 3,300 feet per second at the moment it leaves the barrel.

Many other rifle calibers will fall within that velocity range, again depending on the grain of the bullet and the barrel length of the firearm. This muzzle velocity also pales in comparison to the average velocity of rounds such as the .220 Swift, which generally will travel between 4,000 and 4,300 feet per second.

Even if it were true that a .223/5.56 round travels far faster than other caliber, muzzle velocity is not synonymous with “lethality” or “stopping power.” A faster bullet doesn’t necessarily mean a deadlier bullet or even necessarily more “carnage”—as anyone who has seen the devastating power of a shotgun blast at close range will attest.

The AR-15’s alleged (but fictional) super-lethality is also just a poor basis for banning so-called assault weapons. These bans don’t define “assault weapons” based on caliber, muzzle velocity, or any other functional measure, but on the presence of features such as pistol grips, barrel shrouds, and collapsing stocks.

How would banning AR-15s with these features lessen their muzzle velocity or alleged “deadliness”? The answer: It wouldn’t.

As for Biden’s claim that rounds fired from an AR-15 can “pierce Kevlar,” this is true of almost all common rifle calibers against soft body armor, which is not typically graded to stop rifle rounds.

3. “For God sake [sic], what’s the rationale for these weapons outside of a war zone? They inflict severe damage … the AR-15 just rips the body apart.”

Biden can’t really believe that AR-15s are solely useful for combat. If he did, he and other gun control advocates wouldn’t universally exempt law enforcement officers from these bans (including while the officers are off duty).

In the United States, law enforcement officers aren’t waging offensive warfare or engaging in open combat on a battlefield. Instead, they are peace officers, responding to common criminal threats in a civilian context. They routinely carry AR-15s precisely because these guns are genuinely useful for a wide variety of lawful civilian purposes.

The president’s appeal to the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, as evidence of the AR-15’s ability to “inflict severe damage” on the human body is horribly misguided.

As should already be clear at this point, rounds fired from an AR-15 don’t have a particularly devastating effect compared to either other types of rifle rounds or to the exact same round fired from a “nonassault weapon.” As difficult as it is to consider, not a single child in Uvalde would be any less dead or any less horribly maimed had the gunman used a shotgun, handgun, or “nonassault” rifle under the exact same circumstances.

4. “For those brave right-wing Americans who say it’s all about keeping America independent and safe, if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15 … You need something more than a gun.”

This is an odd assertion for the president to make after dedicating so much time to the mutually exclusive argument that AR-15s are ultra-deadly weapons of war and useful only for combat purposes.

Either the gun is a useless hunk of carbon fiber without any value in a hypothetical armed defense against a tyrant’s military forces, or it is a war zone weapon that should be limited to the battlefield. It cannot be both at the same time.

More importantly, Biden’s argument misunderstands how any large-scale armed defense against a tyrannical government or foreign invader would unfold and underappreciates the role of federalism in ensuring a far more adequate response to such a scenario.

The Framers well understood that an armed but disorganized citizenry alone might struggle against a large standing army under the control of a tyrannical central power. This is precisely why every state has its own organized militia unit, in the form of its State Guard and National Guard units.

Any hypothetical large-scale revolt against a tyrannical federal government almost certainly would involve these well-trained and well-equipped state organized militias—including their fighter jets, tanks, anti-aircraft weapons, and special operations forces.

In other words, although the body of armed citizens (constituting the unorganized militia) creates an incredibly valuable foundation for resisting tyranny, these citizens are not the sole mechanism for it.

5. “There are certain gun dealers that are basically … not gun dealers, they’re wholesalers providing the weapons to anybody who has the money.”

Is Biden alleging that these “gun dealers” are breaking federal law, either by failing to obtain a Federal Firearms License or by failing to abide by laws requiring such licensees to conduct background checks on firearm purchasers?

If so, the president, as chief executive, should direct federal law enforcement agencies to do their jobs, investigate this alleged criminal noncompliance, and ensure these criminals are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But if Biden is not suggesting that these gun sellers are breaking the law, it’s not clear why he seems to hold such disdain for them selling their products in compliance with state and federal regulations.

By definition, if these transactions are conducted lawfully, the prospective buyer passed a federal background and took possession of a firearm that he was permitted to own under all relevant state laws.

Does the president believe that gun stores should act unilaterally to deny law-abiding citizens the exercise of their constitutional rights? Should they not sell to “certain” customers for arbitrary reasons, despite their ability to pay?

Biden never has shown himself to be a particularly serious person when it comes to guns, gun violence, or the Second Amendment.

But this, perhaps, was his most unserious speech yet on these issues.

If Biden really were concerned with saving lives, he would have been in Philadelphia—a city wracked by three straight years with record levels of violence—denouncing rogue prosecutors and detailing his plans to combat “straw” purchasing of firearms.

Instead, Biden was in Wilkes-Barre, arguing that law-abiding citizens should be stopped from buying more of the nation’s most commonly owned rifles because, after all, what’s the point of those rifles when he could just carpet-bomb them into compliance.

At least we’ve now been duly reminded of the dangers posed by large standing armies.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.