Joe Biden confirms Texas trip to ‘comfort’ families of Uvalde shooting
President Biden said Wednesday that he and first lady Jill Biden will visit Texas to “comfort” the families of 21 people murdered in a horrific school shooting — as he again called for new gun control laws.
Biden confirmed plans to visit Uvalde, near San Antonio, at a White House event marking the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, where Biden hosted Floyd’s eight-year-old daughter Gianna and civil rights activists to sign an executive order to curb policing.
“Jill and I will be traveling to Texas in the coming days to meet with the families and let them know we have a sense — just a sense of their pain and hopefully bring some little comfort to the community in shock and grief and trauma,” Biden said.
“We must ask, when in God’s name will we do what needs to be done to if not completely stop, fundamentally change the amount of the carnage that goes on in this country?” Biden went on, echoing his Tuesday night remarks hours after the shooting.
Biden said it was “just wrong” for 18-year-old suspect Salvador Ramos to be able to buy “weapons of war,” referring to two AR-15-style semi-automatic weapons that he legally purchased.
The president said “the Second Amendment is not absolute” and claimed that the US government banned private citizens from owning cannons in the 1700s — a claim that PolitiFact rated “false” when Biden made it on previous occasions.
“When it was passed, you couldn’t own a cannon. You couldn’t own certain kinds of weapons,” Biden said of the Second Amendment.
Biden commented on the Texas tragedy as he hosted the previously scheduled East Room event to mark Floyd’s death. Biden’s executive order to restrain police was panned by critics as tone deaf amid a national surge in violent crime.
The executive order seeks to incentivize local authorities to restrict chokeholds through federal funding conditions. The order also creates a national registry of police officers and federal agents fired for misconduct and restricts the transfer of certain military equipment to local police.
The order was planned before the massacre in Uvalde. Democrats and Republicans proposed competing police reform bills in 2020, but a failure to compromise resulted in neither bill passing.
The Texas shooting followed a series of recent high-profile mass shootings.
Authorities say Ramos murdered 19 children and two adults at the elementary school after shooting his grandmother.
“Of course we are going to visit Texas,” first lady Jill Biden told reporters Wednesday during an event at Dulles Airport in Virginia.
Ramos reportedly purchased his AR-15-style rifles on his 18th birthday.
Similar rifles were used to kill 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store this month, 17 people at a Florida high school in 2018, 60 people at a Las Vegas concert in 2017, 49 people at a Florida nightclub in 2016 and 26 people at a Connecticut elementary school in 2012.
While public figures across the country expressed their sorrow over the Texas shooting, Biden led Democratic calls for Republicans to join them to pass legislation aimed at curbing gun violence.
“Thoughts and prayers are not enough,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on the Senate floor Wednesday, calling it “unacceptable” that there are not 10 Republican senators willing to vote for such legislation.
Gun-reform bills face a tough climb in Congress as Democrats need 60 votes to pass such a bill in the evenly split Senate.
Biden blasted the “gun lobby” Tuesday night over the shooting, pointing to the need for “common sense gun laws.”
“Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone — to have the courage to deal with it and stand up the lobbies? It’s time to turn this pain into action,” Biden said.
Biden has not outlined a specific gun control package, but on Tuesday night mentioned the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which from 1994 to 2004 banned the sale of AR-15-style and certain other guns.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that she wants Congress to pass legislation to raise the age limit to buy an AR-15. She noted that 18- to 21-year-old adults cannot legally buy a beer, but they can buy the powerful gun.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump endorsed a higher age limit for AR-15 rifles, background checks for private gun sales and reforms to let police “take the guns first, go through due process second” to limit the risk posed by mentally ill people. Those reforms didn’t gain traction in Congress.
Senate Republicans signaled they are unlikely to embrace gun control.
“I’m willing to say that I’m very sorry it happened. But guns are not the problem, ok? People are the problem,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told reporters Wednesday. “That’s where it starts. And we’ve had guns forever. And we’re gonna continue to have guns.”
