Fact Check: Video Does NOT Show Joe Biden Promising That If He Wins, He's "Coming For" Your Guns

Fact Check

  • by: Ryan Cooper

STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Fact Check: Video Does NOT Show Joe Biden Promising That If He Wins, He's "Coming For" Your Guns

Did Joe Biden, the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, promise in a video that he's "coming for" your guns? No, that's not true: This is a complete misrepresentation of what the former vice president actually said in the video. Biden was seated with Beto O'Rourke, the one-time presidential candidate who had just endorsed Biden. In the clip, Biden said he was "coming for" O'Rourke, not for people's guns.

The claim originated from a video post published by Conservative Daily on March 4, 2020, titled "Raw Video: Joe Biden Promises That If He Wins, He's "Coming For" Your Guns" (archived here). It opened:

Joe Biden went to grab a late-night hamburger with Beto O'Rourke and when asked about his gun control policy, looked directly into the camera and promised that if he wins, he is "coming for" Americans' guns.

caption_3471833.jpg

Users on social media only saw this:

Raw Video: Joe Biden Promises That If He Wins, He's "Coming For" Your Guns

Joe Biden went to grab a late-night hamburger with Beto O'Rourke and when asked about his gun control policy, looked directly into the camera and promised that if he wins, he is "coming for" Americans' guns.

After endorsing Biden at a rally in Dallas, Texas, on March 2, 2020, the former rival took Biden to Whataburger, a famous Texas fast-food hamburger chain. O'Rourke's wife, Amy Hoover Sanders, was also seated at the table. In a short video making the rounds, Biden spoke to the camera while praising O'Rourke.

Here is a transcript of what Biden actually said in the short video clip:

This guy can change the face of what we're dealing with, with regard to guns, assault weapons, with regard to dealing with climate change, and I just want to warn Amy, if I win, I'm coming for him.

In the video, Biden did not say he was coming for gun owners. He said that if he won the election, he was coming for O'Rourke. In other words, Biden would likely tap the Texan and former 2020 contender for a role in his administration.

Notably, the headline in the YouTube clip only put quotation marks around "coming for" but not "your guns," because Biden never said that what the poster is suggesting. Regardless of what Biden's or O'Rourke's views on gun control may be, the headline on this clip misrepresented what he actually said.

We wrote about disinformation on YouTube before. Here are our most recent articles that mention the site:

Updates:

  • 2020-03-05T22:26:38Z 2020-03-05T22:26:38Z
    An earlier version of this fact check was misunderstood to mean that Biden never made any promises about gun control; that is obviously not the case. The headline was adjusted to clarify this fact-check is only about this particular video. It is clear Biden is talking about "him" (i.e. Beto) and not "'em" (i.e. your guns) because right before he says it he is addressing Amy (O'Rourke's wife), and says he just "warned" her. It seems unlikely he would need to warn her about gun policy; a warning about a possible cabinet job taking away her husband makes much more sense in this context.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper, a staff writer and fact-checker for Lead Stories, is the former Director of Programming at CNN International, where he helped shape the network's daily newscasts broadcast to more than 280 million households around the world. He was based at the network's Los Angeles Bureau. There, he managed the team responsible for a three-hour nightly program, Newsroom LA.

Formerly, he worked at the headquarters in Atlanta, and he spent four years at the London bureau. An award-winning producer, Cooper oversaw the network's Emmy Award-winning coverage of the uprising in Egypt in 2011. He also served as a supervising producer during much of the network's live reporting on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, for which CNN received an Edward R. Murrow Award.

Read more about or contact Ryan Cooper

Different viewpoints

Note: if reading this fact check makes you want to contact us to complain about bias, please check out our Red feed first.

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion