Well, Biden was senile even then, so…..
Joe Biden Said “You Couldn’t Buy a Cannon.” Wrong.
He said the Second Amendment limited the people and the weapons they could own. The text limits the government. A letter of marque took private cannon as given.
On June 23, 2021, in the State Dining Room, he said: “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. You couldn’t buy a cannon.”
That is the claim. The Amendment limited the people. It limited the cannon.
The text does the opposite.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Shall not be infringed is a limit on the government. It is not a menu of who may own what. The Constitution does not grant rights. It does not hand the people a list and cross the cannon off.
What the founding record shows
Jonathan Goldstein, The Militia of the Sea: The Marque and Reprisal Clause as Textual Proof of Private Heavy-Arms Ownership at the Founding (SSRN 7195398, written July 28, 2026; last revised August 13, 2026), reads that claim against the Constitution’s own text.
People could own cannons. That is the point.
Article I, section 8, clause 11 lets Congress “grant letters of marque and reprisal.” A letter of marque authorizes a private citizen to fight in his own ship, with his own cannon. Goldstein: “A license presupposes what it licenses. The Clause takes a privately owned, cannon-armed fleet as given; nothing in the Constitution creates it.” His word “license” means the commission. It is not a carry permit.
Congress issued on the order of 1,700 privateering commissions in the Revolution, voyage by voyage, before the Constitution was ratified. The commission licensed the fight. It did not issue the guns. “The private citizen needed a federal commission to fight. He needed no one’s leave to acquire the guns or to keep them.”
The keep-rule is on the government
Article I, section 10, clause 3 says no state shall, without Congress’s consent, “keep troops, or ships of war in time of peace.”
That keep-rule is on the sovereign. Goldstein: “The Framers made a sovereign ask permission to keep a warship. They made the shipowner ask no one.” And: “Nowhere does the Constitution provide that no person shall keep a ship of war without consent.”
The same Constitution that told a state to ask before it kept a ship of war told the shipowner to ask no one.
Nothing in it says you couldn’t buy a cannon.