When in the course of American events, it becomes necessary for an electorate to decline to reelect a president who has failed in his civic responsibilities small and great, and thereby to peaceably reassume the vital liberties to which the laws of nature entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the political separation.

We still hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The history of the present president of the United States—Joe Biden—is a history of repeated animosity toward such rights, having in particular object the infringement or outright abolition of the right of the people to keep and bear arms. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has ignored the will of the people, seeking to impose his designs upon them through executive orders and legislative actions, thereby circumventing the constitutional processes of governance.

• He has boasted of having “taken more executive actions” to restrict the Second Amendment “than any other president during their first year in office,” and of having issued “dozens of executive actions … more than any of [his] predecessors at this point in their presidencies.”

• He has been chastised repeatedly by the nation’s courts for his illegal attempts to change the definition of the term “firearm” and the laws governing pistol braces in ways that the U.S. Code patently does not permit.

• He has called, on more than 25 different occasions, for the prohibition of the most-commonly owned firearms in the United States and for the banning of
standard-issue magazines, despite both being clearly protected by the “in common use” standard laid out in D.C. v. Heller.

• He has demanded that Congress give him the power to superintend every private gun transaction in the United States, and, when it has declined to do so, he has redefined commonly understood words such as “dealer” and stretched the terms of the existing background-check laws much further than their text will allow.

• He has expressed “disappointment” at the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, that the Constitution does not permit the government to demand a “good cause” before free citizens are able to exercise their basic rights.

• He has instructed the White House press office to describe the spread of constitutional carry across the United States as “shameful” and “the opposite of commonsense,” and to imply that Americans who support permitless carry are in favor of mass shootings.

• He has directed hundreds of billions of dollars in support of the establishment of state-level red-flag laws that lack crucial due-process protections and are ripe for political abuse.

• He has drafted “model legislation” for the states, which calls for each of them to “establish a state Office of Gun Violence Prevention” and to “hold the gun industry accountable,” as well as to adopt unconstitutional “safe-storage” laws that would require gun owners to disable their firearms or lock them away out of reach.

• He has nominated hundreds of judges to the federal judiciary who are openly hostile toward the Second Amendment, and he aims to adjust the balance of power on the Supreme Court to the same effect.

• He has filled his cabinet with anti-Second Amendment activists and appointed a surgeon general who believes that private gun ownership is a disease to be cured.

• He has lied about the history of the right to keep and bear arms in America, proposing that “you weren’t allowed to own a cannon during the Revolutionary War as an individual” and that “you couldn’t buy a cannon” at the time of the Constitution’s ratification—neither of which is true.

• He has lied about the scope of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms in contemporary America, submitting that the Second Amendment “says there are certain weapons that you just can’t own;” that “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;” and that “you can’t own a machine gun”—none of which is true.

• He has lied about the intentions of gun manufacturers in America, contending that the aim of such companies is to “knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” and that our existing legal framework tolerates, and even encourages, this end.

• He has lied about the intentions of gun dealers in the United States, arguing that “they’re wholesalers providing the weapons to anybody who has the money.”

• He has lied about the effects of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which he claims “brought down these mass killings,” but which studies from the Obama administration’s Department of Justice, the RAND Corporation and Criminology & Public Policy concluded did no such thing.

• He has lied about the real problems that Americans face by cynically twisting statistics that illustrate the problem of gang-related street-crime into the false claim that “gun violence is the leading cause of death for children in our nation.”

• He has misinformed the public about the nature of key bipartisan federal manufacturing protections by insisting that the firearms industry is “the only industry in America that is exempted from being able to be sued by the public”—this is a lie.

• He has attempted to change federal liability standards, so that firearms manufacturers can be held legally responsible if criminals use guns.

• He has misinformed the public about the NRA, which he has described as “the only outfit in the nation that we cannot sue as an institution”—this is another lie.

• He has repeated false statistics about the number of mass shootings that are willfully peddled by activists.

• He has deceived the country about the so-called “gun-show loophole,” by falsely asserting that it is legal for licensed dealers to sell firearms without a background check if they are operating outside of their places of business.

• He has been fact-checked over and over again for the foregoing, yet he has responded to these corrections by doubling down.

• He has disgracefully acted upon his campaign promise that his “enemy is the gun manufacturers” by instituting a “zero-tolerance” policy at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that has had the practical effect of harassing legitimate gun dealers that, under his new rules, are eligible to be shut down for a single inadvertent violation.

• He has shown a shocking lack of knowledge about how firearms work, including in a bizarre incident during which he asserted nonsensically that if you “put a pistol on a brace, and it … turns into a gun … makes them where you can have a higher-caliber weapon … a higher-caliber bullet … coming out of that gun … it’s essentially turning it into a short-barreled rifle.”

• He has he responded to a concerned citizen who complained about his political positions by cursing, demanding that the man “shush, shush” and then instructing him not to be “such a horse’s ass.”

• he has appointed the one person within his cabinet who knows even less about firearms than he does—Vice President Kamala Harris (D)—as the head of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a political, taxpayer-funded campaign to undermine one of the sacred provisions within the U.S. Bill of Rights.

• He has nominated David Chipman—a rabid gun-control activist whose previous role was as a senior policy adviser at the gun-control group Giffords—to run the ATF and, when the Senate refused to approve him, nominated Steven Dettelbach, who has called for “a ban on certain types of assault weapons” and “universal background checks.”

• He has mocked the vital role that an armed populace plays in the preemptive prevention of tyranny, implying that, were the U.S. government to turn on the people, the citizenry would need “F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons” to have any chance of surviving an armed conflict against the U.S. government.

• He has degraded and vilified millions of American gun owners by pretending that there is something insidious or suspicious about their wanting to own magazines that can hold more rounds than he personally deems necessary, and by declaring ridiculously that the “only reason” that a person might want a gun that can fire more than 30 rounds is that he believes that “the deer are wearing Kevlar vests.”

• He has presided over a Department of Justice that has downplayed the crimes involving the abuse of firearms that were allegedly committed by his son, Hunter, even as he has demanded stricter laws governing the behavior of law-abiding gun owners.

• He has abdicated his responsibility to address the matter of crime in a sober and judicious manner; for example, he has not cracked down on straw purchases, called for effective prosecutors in America’s major cities or rejected the soft-on-crime policies that are celebrated within his party. He prefers, instead, to deliver politically divisive speeches that do nothing of consequence to make anyone safer.

• He has inexplicably regressed on the Second Amendment, having gone from saying in the U.S. Senate in 1985 that he has “never believed that additional gun control or federal registration of guns would reduce crime” to accusing Americans who hold the same position as he once did of not caring about murder.

• He has steadfastly ignored the key details of the crimes that he has discussed in his official capacity, preferring to tie them to his desired gun-control policies whether they intersect or not.

• He has shown palpable anger when addressing Americans who disagree with him, political organizations that disagree with him, gun manufacturers that engage in their constitutionally protected trade and law-abiding citizens who do not want to be encumbered by government, while reserving no energy for the denunciation of those who are responsible for the abuses he decries.

In every stage of these infractions, we have petitioned for redress in the most-humble terms, yet our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A president whose character is thus marked is unsuitable to be reelected as the leader of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to President Biden. We have informed him from time to time of his mistakes. We have reminded him of the circumstances of our constitutional order. We have appealed to his reason and political attentions, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these infringements.

We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our political separation. On November 5, we must part.

Article by CHARLES C. W. COOKE