President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday celebrated the gun safety reform law Biden signed last month, exactly one week after another mass shooting in which a gunman killed seven in Highland Park, Illinois. Biden echoed calls from advocates and victims’ family members for more impactful action, including a ban on semi-automatic weapons.
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act provides $750 million in funding to incentivize states to implement red flag laws — which can keep guns out of the hands of people considered dangerous— closes a loophole to keep guns away from more domestic abusers, increases mental health services for children and families and enhances background checks for gun buyers under 21 years old.
It was passed in the wake of the deadly mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y. and Uvalde, Texas and signed by Biden late last month. Victims’ family members, members of communities impacted by gun violence and gun reform advocates were among the dozens in the audience on the White House’s South Lawn on Monday.
Yet some advocates said any celebration was premature and out-of-touch with what they feel is a more urgent need for reform.
Manuel Oliver, father of Parkland shooting victim Joaquin Oliver, interrupted the president’s speech on Monday, calling on him to open an office in the White House to deal with gun violence and appoint a gun czar.
“You have to do more than this!” Oliver yelled, Biden listening and responding: “We have one. Let me finish my time.”
Biden himself on Monday made an explicit call for a federal ban on “assault weapons.” He helped pass the first ban of that kind in 1994, a law that expired in 2004.
“Some people claim it’s for sport or to hunt,” Biden said of AR-15s and similar semi-automatic guns. “These weapons maximize the damage done coupled with those bullets, and human flesh and bone is just torn apart.”
The president detailed how U.S. service members must go through extensive training and checks to use similar weapons in the military, “yet we continue to let these weapons be sold to people with no training or expertise.”
Biden also said he owned four shotguns and believed in the second amendment as a “responsible gun owner.”
But, he added, “guns are the number one killer of children in the United States.”
“With rights come responsibilities,” Biden said. “Yes, there's a right to bear arms. We also have a right to live freely, without fear for our lives."
Dr. Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician from Uvalde, Texas who aided victims of the Robb Elementary shooting, spoke at the White House on Monday. He previously testified about seeing unidentifiable bodies of children killed at the hospital where he worked that day.
“It’s tough being a pediatrician in a community where kids don’t want to go back to school and their parents don’t want to send them,” he said Monday, later adding: “Hopefully, this is the start of a movement toward banning assault weapons.”
Garnell Whitfield Jr., whose 86-year-old mother Ruth was killed in the Buffalo supermarket shooting earlier this summer, called for social reforms, too.
“We know that this is only the first step,” he said of the gun safety law in focus on Monday. “We must address white supremacy and direct domestic terrorism.”
President Biden admitted to victims’ families that the law was long overdue, and he promised it would set off more change.
“You've felt and you feel the price of inaction,” he said. “That this has taken too long with too much of a trail of bloodshed and carnage.”
“But because of your work, your advocacy, your courage, lives will be saved today and tomorrow because of this,” he added to applause.
“Success begets success,” he added. “We’ve finally moved that mountain — a mountain of opposition, obstruction and indifference that stood in the way and stopped every effort at gun safety for thirty years in this nation. Now’s the time to galvanize this movement.”