BOULDER – President Joe Biden called yesterday for a US ban on assault weapons, after the country’s second mass shooting in a week left 10 people dead in Colorado and sparked urgent new calls for gun control.
Addressing a nation long traumatized by gun massacres in schools, nightclubs, movie theaters and other public spaces, Biden said he did not “need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps that will save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act.”
“We can ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines in this country once again,” said Biden, recalling that Congress previously overcame its divisions to pass a 10-year ban on such weapons back in 1994.
“This is not and should not be a partisan issue. This is an American issue. It will save lives. American lives. And we have to act.”
Tighter gun control is popular with Americans – but Republicans have long stood against what some view as any infringement on their right to bear arms.
Biden spoke in Washington hours after a 21-year-old man was charged with shooting 10 people in a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.
That massacre came less than a week after another gunman shot dead eight people at multiple spas in the Georgia state capital Atlanta.
Together the killings ignited new calls for politicians to act – but the familiar bipartisan divide was emerged once more.
‘Cowardly politicians’
This month the House of Representatives passed two measures aimed at enhancing background checks and closing a loophole related to a deadly 2015 church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.
The bills address a popular premise among American voters: that background checks be required for all US firearm sales, including those at gun shows.
But they are unlikely to pass through the Senate, which would require at least nine Republicans to vote for them.
Nevertheless majority Senate leader Chuck Schumer said he had committed to bringing background checks to the floor. “This Senate is going to debate and address the epidemic of gun violence in this country,” he said yesterday.
‘Machine gun’
Colorado has previously suffered two of the most infamous mass shootings in US history – at Columbine High School in 1999, and at a movie theater in Aurora in 2012.
The city of Boulder imposed a ban on “assault-style weapons” and large-capacity gun magazines in the wake of the Parkland, Florida shooting in 2018.
But a judge last week blocked that ban, the Denver Post reported, in a decision hailed by the National Rifle Association, a powerful pro-gun advocacy group.
The suspect of yesterday’s shooting, who surrendered a rifle and a semiautomatic handgun at the scene, had purchased a Ruger AR-556 pistol last Tuesday, according to a police affidavit.
He was seen by family members playing with a “machine gun” at their home “about two days ago,” it said.
The NRA tweeted a copy of the Second Amendment on the right to bear arms after the Colorado shooting. – AFP, March 24, 2021
