President Joe Biden announced on Thanksgiving Day that he will renew a call for banning firearms in the wake of Tuesday’s mass shooting at a Virginia Walmart.
“The idea we still allow semiautomatic weapons to be purchased is sick, it’s just sick. It has no social redeeming value, zero, none. Not a single, solitary rationale for it,” Biden told reporters gathered in front of a Nantucket firehouse.
When asked whether he could accomplish anything during the lame-duck session of Congress, Biden reaffirmed: “I will try. I’m going to try to get rid of assault weapons.”
Biden has a long track record of pledging to ban guns. Back in 1993, as a Delaware senator, Biden assisted in pushing through Congress the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, establishing background checks on firearm ownership. The following year, working alongside senator Dianne Feinstein, Biden helped pass an assault-weapon and high-capacity-magazine ban that lasted ten years. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden told CNN during a town-hall discussion, “I’m going to get an assault-weapons ban. . . . Before this is over, I’m going to get that again. Not a joke, and watch.”
Little meaningful change has followed these rhetorical flourishes. In July 2022, after the tragedy of the Uvalde school shooting, Democrats passed a semiautomatic-weapons ban that garnered no Republican support in the House. The move was purely symbolic and had no potential of making it through the Senate.
According to the New York Times, the month leading up to Thanksgiving has been particularly violent. There have been at least three mass shootings that have claimed the lives of over a dozen people across Virginia and Colorado, leaving scores more injured. Last Saturday, an reportedly non-binary individual shot up a gay bar killing five people and wounding another 18 before patrons subdued him. That attack came less than a week after a student opened fire on the University of Virginia campus killing three student-athletes.