President Biden pointed to the recent attack on former president Donald Trump in renewing his call for a ban on assault weapons such as the AR-15. An AR-style weapon was used in the shooting at a Trump campaign rally, “just as it was an assault weapon that killed so many others, including children,” he said.
“It’s time to outlaw them,” Biden said, speaking to the NAACP convention in Las Vegas on Tuesday, adding that “I did it once and I will do it again.” Biden successfully negotiated a 10-year ban on assault weapons as a senator in 1994.
“More children in America die of a gunshot wound than any other reason,” he told the convention. “That’s stunning and that is sick. And it’s sheer cowardice if we do nothing about it.”
One spectator was killed in the attack and two were critically injured. Trump said a bullet hit his ear, and he appeared at the Republican National Convention on Monday with a white bandage covering it. Authorities say 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks used an AR-style rifle owned by his father. The AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in the United States, according to industry figures.
The gun was used in the majority of the deadliest U.S. mass shootings since 2012. The high-velocity weapon fires a barrage of bullets, often 30 but even 100, in quick succession, each of which can travel at a speed that would cross six football fields in a second. Its popularity skyrocketed after the 1994 ban on assault weapons expired in 2004.
Renewing that ban has proved an insurmountable challenge two decades later, despite Biden’s repeated stated desire to do so. The 1994 ban was a signature achievement of his career, added as an amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to a sweeping crime bill during the Clinton presidency, which Biden helped push through Congress. But he now faces a vastly different political landscape.
Revulsion at high-profile shootings have largely not resulted in increased controls. Some limitations on gun sales have been struck down by the courts, and advocates for gun-control measures have often faced opposition in Congress and a tough public opinion battle in parts of the country.
In one significant exception, Biden signed a bipartisan gun-control bill into law in 2022, in the wake of mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo. It funded mental health services and school security initiatives, expanded criminal background checks for some gun buyers, barred a larger group of domestic-violence offenders from purchasing firearms and funded programs that would allow authorities to seize guns from troubled individuals.
The attack against Trump does not seem to have broadly changed his party’s views on gun control. A senior adviser to his presidential campaign, Chris LaCivita, told an event hosted by a gun rights group at the Republican convention on Tuesday that, if elected, Trump would appoint judges who oppose new firearm limits in a “continuation of supporting and defending the Second Amendment,” Reuters reported.