President Joe Biden said Thursday he is open to a last-ditch effort to ban assault weapons as the 117th Congress winds down and Republicans prepare to take control of the House in January.
With Democrats in control of both houses of Congress for just a few weeks, Biden said he would “start counting the votes” to see how far such legislation could go.
“I’m going to try to get rid of assault weapons,” he told reporters during a Thanksgiving visit to the island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts.
In less than a week, two mass shootings have killed at least five people in a Colorado nightclub and at least six people at a Virginia Walmart, once again renewing the national debate about how to stop these killings horrible. Authorities say the Colorado suspect had both an AR-style rifle and a handgun, and the Virginia suspect, now deceased, used a handgun.
Assault-style weapons are often seen in the deadliest mass shootings, including both the Uvalde school shooting and the Buffalo supermarket shooting that drew national and international attention this year.
Biden has repeatedly said he is “determined to ban assault weapons again” in the United States after successfully helping implement a ban on new sales of semi-automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines in 1994.
Although the term “assault weapon” is often criticized by gun rights advocates because its meaning is not well defined, it generally refers to semi-automatic rifles designed for rapid fire.
“The idea that we still allow the purchase of semi-automatic weapons is sick, it’s just sick,” Biden said Thursday. “It has no social redemption value, zero, none. No single, single reason for this.
The 1994 assault weapons ban was allowed to expire after a decade during the Bush administration.
Other potential solutions include red flag laws, which allow a judge to step in and prevent a person from accessing their guns if they are believed to be at risk of confiscation. Some gun control advocates say these laws can be very effective, but more public awareness is needed to help them reach their full potential.
Colorado has a red flag law in place, but why it wasn’t used in the case of Anderson Lee Aldrich, the Colorado club shooting suspect, is not yet fully understood.
Biden remarked on the apparent exaggeration while speaking to reporters in Nantucket.
“The idea that we don’t enforce red flag laws … is ridiculous,” he said.
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