President Biden is demanding new laws to regulate firearms, but by displaying ignorance of basic facts, he gives the impression of being more interested in scoring political points than delivering a bullseye against crime — making more elusive real solutions in line with the Second Amendment.

The President spoke on Friday at the Safer Communities Summit. It was organized by politicians and special interest groups on the left. Mr. Biden took a victory lap for his actions on guns while displaying his trademark tendency to speak first and fact-check later. 

Mr. Biden said he “made it illegal to manufacture so-called ‘ghost guns.’” He did, but first that required giving that scary new name to weapons which are made at home and which criminals — who care nothing for executive orders or laws — can still do in the way they might build a bomb or cultivate anthrax.

Ghost guns, Mr. Biden said, “don’t have serial numbers.” True, but anyone who’s watched an episode of a police procedural like “Colombo” has seen guns with serial numbers removed for dramatic effect because this is often the case in the real world.

A serial number can be filed, drilled, or ground off; scraped, welded, or pounded into illegibility with a punch — known as “peening” — and new numbers can be stamped over the old the way clever students used to turn F’s into B’s on their report cards. It’s just not that hard.

Mr. Biden said he “made it harder for people to buy stabilized braces,” saying, “Put a pistol on a brace, and it turns it into a gun,” as if a pistol isn’t already a gun. In the next sentence, the president said a brace makes pistols “where you can have a higher-caliber weapon — a higher-caliber bullet coming out of that gun.”

No, the barrel determines the caliber of a bullet a gun fires — 0.22 for 22/100ths of an inch, a 9mm, and so forth. A strap doesn’t change that. “It’s essentially turning it into a short-barreled rifle,” Mr. Biden said of braces, but “rifle” refers to another feature of the barrel: The spiral inside that spins the bullet for greater accuracy, the same way a football is thrown.

Furthermore, modern pistols are all rifled and have short barrels. Plus, the fact that, as Mr. Biden said, such weapons have “been a weapon of choice by a number of mass shooters,” doesn’t mean it has only sinister applications.

Pistol braces were invented for disabled veterans and were first approved by President Obama when Mr. Biden was his vice president. For this reason, yesterday the House passed a bipartisan resolution opposing Mr. Biden’s rule.

Mr. Biden speaks with such conviction and authority even when he’s wrong that it makes it difficult for him to be an honest broker in tackling the problem of gun crime. Take his favorite solution for police wounding or killing civilians.

“Instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill,” he said at an ABC town hall in 2020, “you shoot them in the leg,” an idea he repeated at the Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

The president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, John Evans, told Fox that the proposal was both “absolutely ridiculous” and “incredibly ignorant.” The vice president of the national Fraternal Order of Police, Joe Gamaldi, called it “completely ridiculous,” “unrealistic,” and a “pandering talking point.”

In another incident, in 2013, Mr. Biden said he told his wife, “Jill, if there’s ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here. Walk out and put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house,’” encouraging her to violate several Delaware laws against discharging into the air like Yosemite Sam.

As I’ve written in the Sun before, Mr. Biden has yet to shed the bad habits he developed during 40 years in the Senate, where hot air is standard practice. His words have more consequence now, and on issues like gun violence, Americans deserve a president who speaks straight, not a verbal Annie Oakley who shoots from the lip.