President Joe Biden instructed reporters on Monday he spent greater than three and a half hours with survivors and the households of victims of final week’s mass taking pictures in Uvalde, Texas, the place a gunman killed 19 kids and two lecturers at Robb Elementary School.
Returning to Washington, Biden mentioned the ache he witnessed in Uvalde was “palpable” and “unnecessary” and that he was — and at all times had been — dedicated to gun management efforts meant to scale back extra violence.
But there was solely a lot he might do as a president, he mentioned. Major adjustments would want to be licensed by Congress, the place a bipartisan group of lawmakers are once more in negotiations over a potential invoice regardless of how divided they continue to be over weapons.
When a reporter requested Biden exterior the White House if he felt extra motivated to act on laws now, within the wake of latest shootings such as Uvalde, he mentioned he has been “motivated all along.”
“I’m going to continue to push and we’ll see how this works,” he mentioned.
“I can’t outlaw a weapon. I can’t change the background checks,” he mentioned. This is the place the legislature ought to act, he mentioned.
For instance, he mentioned, “It makes no sense to be able to purchase something that can fire up to 300 rounds.”
He instructed reporters how as a senator he as soon as spoke with trauma medical doctors who confirmed him an X-Ray of the injury a high-caliber weapon can inflict on the physique — how “a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in a lung and we could probably get it out, may be able to get it and save the life, [but] a 9 mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.”
“The idea of these high-caliber weapon, there’s simply no rational basis for it, in terms of whether this be about self-protection, hunting,” he mentioned.
President Joe Biden and first girl Jill Biden board Marine One on return journey to Washington, from Brandywine Creek State Park in Wilmington, Delaware, May 30, 2022.
Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
“The Constitution, the Second Amendment, was never absolute,” Biden mentioned. “You couldn’t buy a canon when the Second Amendment was passed. You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons.”
The president spoke with reporters moments after stepping off Marine One at some point after his go to to Uvalde, the place he instructed a crowd of demonstrators “we will” as they chanted for him to “do something” about gun violence.
The bloodbath in Texas was preceded lower than two weeks earlier by one other mass taking pictures in Buffalo, New York. Ten Black folks have been killed in a grocery retailer in what authorities suspect was a racially motivated assault.
Those back-to-back killings have prompted a bunch of bipartisan senators — 4 Republicans and 5 Democrats — to have interaction in preliminary conversations about new gun legal guidelines. Democrats want not less than some GOP help, although conservatives largely oppose legislating the problem, as a substitute specializing in the so-called “hardening” of college safety and different measures.
The group of lawmakers meant to meet through video over the recess to continue hashing out the place they stand and the place a potential compromise might be brokered.
“We’re getting started to try to figure out if there’s a path to getting to a consensus, and we’ll see where it takes us,” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., mentioned final week.
The White House, which took a extra direct position in earlier legislative priorities, has mentioned the president will observe the method as it proceeds. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was requested repeatedly what the administration noticed as its position in pushing for a brand new regulation.
“We really, truly leave the mechanics up to Sen. Schumer and Speaker Pelosi,” Jean-Pierre mentioned final week, referring to the Senate majority chief and House speaker. “We are confident that Sen. Schumer will bring this forward. And again, it is time for Congress to act. This is what the president has been calling for since the beginning of his administration.”
Biden, who based mostly his 2020 marketing campaign partially on his document of working throughout the aisle as a senator, was requested on Monday if he thought Republicans would strategy the problem in a different way this time. He mentioned that he hadn’t spoken to any of them, “but my guess is yes, I think they’re going to take a hard look.”
President Joe Biden speaks to reporters as he returns to the White House from Delaware on the South Lawn in Washington, D.C., May 30, 2022.
Andrew Harnik/AP
When he landed in Uvalde on Sunday, he and first girl Jill Biden have been greeted by state officers together with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a staunch opponent of the president’s agenda and a proponent of pro-gun legal guidelines.
The Bidens’ go to to the Uvalde was targeted on assembly with the victims, their households and the primary responders to the taking pictures — not selling a legislative agenda. The president mentioned Monday on the White House that he “deliberately did not engage in a debate about that with any Republican” throughout his journey.
He mentioned he would continue to take govt actions concerning firearms and sounded a be aware of cautious optimism about the place the congressional talks might lead.
“I consider Sen. [Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell a rational Republican, and [Sen. John] Cornyn is as well,” he mentioned. “I think there’s a recognition on their part … that we can’t continue like this.”