June 3,2022:In an emotional speech broadcast live on national television, United States President Joe Biden has called on lawmakers to pass legislation to curb gun violence in the country, a week after 19 children were shot dead by a gunman in their school.
Biden proposed a number of laws, including a ban on assault weapons, which was allowed to lapse under a Republican administration in 2004. Other proposals included a limit on high capacity magazines, secure storage laws, “red flag” laws, universal background checks and the removal of protection laws for gun manufacturers.
“It’s time to act,” Biden said from the White House. “For the children we have lost. For the children we can save. For the nation we love. Let’s meet the moment. It’s time to act.”
The impassioned speech, broadcast during primetime in the US, followed a series of mass shootings across the country in which gunmen have targeted Black people in Buffalo, schoolchildren in Uvalde and doctors in Tulsa.
Peppering his speech with declarations of “enough”, Biden said too many places in the US had become “killing fields”, and urged Republicans in the Senate to back changes to legislation that would make the country safer for everyone.
Alluding to the mid-term elections later this year, he said gun control was a matter of “common sense” and stressed that the Second Amendment, which gun proponents use to curb regulation, was not absolute.
Jason Nichols, a social and political analyst, at the University of Maryland, told Al Jazeera that while he did not expect Republicans to commit to a ban on assault weapons, the November polls might encourage them to adopt some of Biden’s other proposals.
Republicans and some Democrats have blocked tougher gun regulation even after horrific mass shootings such as the murder of 20 young children at a primary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut in 2012.
