“The most common rounds fired from an AR-15 move almost twice as fast as that from a handgun.”
— Biden, remarks on Safer Communities Act at the White House, July 11
- Several readers asked about the president’s comment this week that a round from an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle travels five times faster than any other gun. When we asked about the evidence for this claim, a White House official pointed to his remarks in July — “almost twice as fast” — as a more specific statement.
- Translation: the president bungled the statistic the second time around. As is often the case with Biden, a carefully-crafted sentence in his prepared text got hyped up in his retelling weeks later.
