President, Dems renew bid to ban assault weapons
WASHINGTON — When President Biden speaks about the “scourge” of gun violence, his go-to answer is to zero in on assault weapons.
America has heard it hundreds of times, including last 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 very 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 shooting Nov. 19 at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs that killed five people, 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 highpowered guns or semiautomatic long rifles, like an AR-15, that can fire 30 rounds fast without reloading. By comparison, New York Police Department officers carry a handgun that shoots about half that much.
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 vocal 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, and I think Democrats are finally sort of catching up with where the public has been.”
Just over half of voters want to see nationwide gun policy made more strict, according to AP VoteCast, a 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% 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 only one-quarter want to see gun laws be made less strict.
Once banned in the United States, the high-powered 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 sales of the weapons to expire a decade later, unable to muster the political support to counter the powerful gun lobby and reinstate the weapons ban.
A 60-vote threshold in the Senate means some Republicans must be on board. Most are are steadfastly opposed, arguing it would be too complicated, especially as sales and varieties of the firearms have proliferated.
There are many more types of these high-powered guns today than in 1994, when the ban was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
“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.
Biden, along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was instrumental in helping secure the 1990s ban as a senator. The White House said that while it was in place, mass shootings declined, and when it expired in 2004, shootings tripled.