WASHINGTON — A day after a gunman killed four people at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, President Biden addressed the nation from the White House and vowed to pressure Congress to enact new gun control measures, including reimbursing gun control measures. banning assault weapons, making background checks more universal and introducing so-called red flag laws that make it easier for judges to declare that people in difficulty can be prevented from possessing weapons.
“We should ban assault weapons and high-capacity warehouses,” Biden said. “And if we can’t ban assault weapons, then we need to raise the buying age from 18 to 21. Strengthen background checks and safe-storage laws and warning signs. Revoke the immunity that protects arms manufacturers from liability. Address the mental health crisis.”
The ambitious vision is sure to meet headwinds on Capitol Hill, where a bitterly divided Senate struggles to reach a consensus on measures far more modest than the ones Biden envisioned Thursday night.
The president’s speech, announced earlier in the day, had a sense of tragic familiarity. Biden had similarly addressed the nation last month after a racist massacre in Buffalo, NY, claimed 10 lives and, later in May, after a gunman killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
“How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” Biden asked Thursday, just as he did after Uvalde, where the murder of 19 children and two teachers shocked a nation that had become all too accustomed to gun violence.
There have been 20 mass shootings (classified as shootings involving four or more victims) since Uvalde, the president noted. More than 18,000 thousand people have been killed by firearms in the United States this year, a rate much higher than in other developed countries.
Citing some of the worst mass shootings in recent American history — Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas — Biden acknowledged that none of those killings had urged Congress to impose gun control measures.
“That can’t be true this time,” he said, reassuring the Americans that he was not the anti-gun fanatic of the conservative caricature. “I respect the culture and tradition and concerns of legal gun owners. At the same time, like all rights, the Second Amendment is not absolute,” he said, reminding his audience that conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia had once made the same point.
As a Delaware senator, Biden helped draft the 1994 assault weapons ban, which research has shown reduced the incidence of gun violence across the country. The ban expired in 2004, during the George W. Bush administration.
Biden was vice president to Barack Obama in 2012 when a gunman attacked Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. stormed, killing 20 young children and six adults. Obama promised action, but even a relatively modest two-pronged plan to expand background checks failed to pass the Senate.
Since then, Democrats have been hesitant to spend political capital on gun control. But the murders in Buffalo, Uvalde and Tulsa appear to have sparked dormant convictions, even as Republican-led states rush to relax remaining restrictions on gun ownership.
Negotiations to compromise on Capitol Hill are currently being led by Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn., but those efforts pale in comparison to the agenda Biden envisioned Thursday. Alluding to widespread support in the US electorate for the measures he mandated — including the ban on assault weapons — Biden suggested that doing nothing this time could lead to backlash at the November polls.
“If Congress fails, I think a majority of Americans won’t give up this time either,” he said. “I believe the majority of you will act and turn your outrage into putting this issue at the center of your vote.”
At one point, Biden used the stage whispers he likes to emphasize, to channel the anger so many Americans feel at the ever-growing toll of gun violence in the country.
“Enough!” he hissed. “Enough!”
