Biden, Dems talking tougher for controls on high-powered guns
Jeremy Trevino, 10, takes part in a Raise Our Voices to Raise the Age March for Our Lives Rally in Austin in August.
WASHINGTON — When President Joe Biden speaks about the “scourge” of gun violence, his go-to answer is to zero in on socalled assault weapons.
America has heard it hundreds of times, including this week after shootings in Colorado and Virginia: The president wants to sign into law a ban on high-powered guns that have the capacity to kill many people quickly.
“The idea we still allow semiautomatic weapons to be purchased is sick. Just sick,” Biden said on Thanksgiving Day. “I’m going to try to get rid of assault weapons.”
After the mass killing last Saturday at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, he said in a statement: “When will we decide we’ve had enough? ... We need to enact an assault weapons ban to get weapons of war off America’s streets.”
When Biden and other lawmakers talk about “assault weapons,” they are using an inexact
term to describe a group of high-powered guns or semi-automatic long rifles, such as an AR-15, that can fire 30 rounds fast without reloading.
A weapons ban is far off in a closely divided Congress. But Biden and the Democrats have become increasingly emboldened in pushing for stronger gun controls — and doing so with no clear electoral consequences.
The Democratic-led House passed legislation in July to revive a 1990s-era ban on “assault weapons,” with Biden’s support. And the president pushed a ban nearly everywhere that he campaigned this year.
Still, in the midterm elections, Democrats kept control of the Senate and Republicans were only able to claim the slimmest House majority in two decades.
The tough talk follows passage in June of a landmark bipartisan bill on gun laws, and it reflects steady progress that gun control advocates have been making in recent years.
“I think the American public has been waiting for this message,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-conn., who has been the Senate’s leading advocate for stronger gun control since the massacre of 20 children at a school in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. “There has been a thirst from voters, especially swing voters, young voters, parents, to hear candidates talk about gun violence.”
Just over half of voters want to see nationwide gun policy made more strict, according to AP Votecast, an extensive survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide conducted for the Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago. About 3 in 10 want gun policy kept as is. Only 14 percent prefer looser gun laws.
There are clear partisan divides. About 9 in 10 Democrats want stricter gun laws, compared with about 3 in 10 Republicans. About half of Republicans want gun laws left as they are, and one-quarter want to see gun laws be made less strict.
Once banned in the United States, the highpowered firearms are now the weapon of choice among young men responsible for many of the most devastating mass shootings. Congress allowed the restrictions first put in place in 1994 on the manufacture and sale of the weapons to expire a decade later, unable to muster the political support to counter the powerful gun lobby and reinstate the ban.
Law enforcement officials have long called for stricter gun laws, arguing that the availability of these weapons makes people less safe and makes their jobs more dangerous.
Mike Moore, chief of the
Los Angeles Police Department, said it just makes sense to talk about guns when gun violence is rising nationwide and to consider what the government can do to make the streets safer.
“This isn’t a one and done,” Moore said of the shooting in Colorado Springs. “These things are evolving all the time, in other cities, at any moment another incident happens. It’s crying out for the federal government, for our legislators, to go out and make this change.”
On Tuesday, six people were shot dead at a Walmart in Virginia. Over the past six months there has been a supermarket shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., a massacre of schoolchildren in Uvalde and a July Fourth killing of revelers in Highland Park, Ill.
The legislation that Biden signed in June will, among other things, help states put in place red flag laws, which make it easier for authorities to take
weapons from people judged to be dangerous.
But a ban was never on the table.
A 60-vote threshold in the Senate means some Republicans must be on board. Most are steadfastly opposed, arguing it would be too complicated, especially as sales and varieties of the firearms have proliferated.
“I’d rather not try to define a whole group of guns
as being no longer available to the American public,” said Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who is a hunter and owns several guns, some of them passed down through his family. “For those of us who have grown up with guns as part of our culture, and we use them as tools — there’s millions of us, there’s hundreds of millions of us — that use them lawfully.”
In many states where gun bans have been enacted, the restrictions are being challenged in court, gaining strength from a Supreme Court ruling in June expanding gun rights.
“We feel pretty confident, even despite the arguments made by the other side, that history and tradition as well as the text of the Second Amendment are on our side,” said David Warrington, chairman and general counsel for the National Association for Gun Rights.
But gun control advocates see progress on the issue.
“The fact that the American people elected a president who has long been a vocal and steadfast supporter of bold gun safety laws — and recently reelected a gun-sense majority to the Senate — says everything you need to know about how dramatically the politics on this issue have shifted,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety.