Troops likely to miss withdrawal deadline

President Joe Biden seems ready to let lapse a May 1 target date for completely removing U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

in 2018 attended the hear- ing. Biden thanked them for attending, saying he under- stood it would remind them of the awful days when they got the calls.

He assured them, “We’re absolutely determined to make change.”

Bid e n’s Thursday annou nc e ment d elivers on a pledge the president made last month to take what he termed immediate “common-sense steps” to address gun violence, after a series of mass shootings drew renewed attention to the issue. His announcement came the same day as yet another, this one in South Carolina, where five people were killed.

Biden emphasized the scope of the problem: Between the mass killings in Atlanta massage businesses and the Colorado grocery store shooting last month, there were more than 850 additional shootings that killed 250 and injured 500 in the U.S., he said.

But Thursday’s announce- ment underscores the limitations of Biden’s executive power to act on guns. His orders tighten regulations on homemade guns and provide more resources for gun-violence prevention but fall far short of the sweeping gun-control agenda he laid out on the campaign trail.

Indeed, Biden again urged Congress to act, calling on the Senate to take up Housepassed measures closing background check loopholes. He also said Congress should pass the Violence Against Women Act, eliminate legal exemptions for gun manufac- turers and ban assault weap- ons and high capacity mag- azines. Biden said.

“This is not a partisan issue among the American people,” Biden insisted.

While Biden asserted that he’s “willing to work with anyone to get it done,” gun control measures face slim prospects in an evenly divided Senate, where Repub- licans remain near-unified against most proposals.

Biden was joined at the event by Vice President Kamala Harris and Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland said he was “under no illusions about how hard it is to solve the problem of gun violence” and empha- sized a need for a “collective effort to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and save lives.”

The Justice Department cannot solve the problem by itself, he said, but “there is work for the department to do, and we intend to do it.”