Biden: Want An Assault Weapon?

Even as a Senate panel postponed a vote on a long-shot effort to reinstate an assault weapons ban on Tuesday, Vice President Biden isn’t giving up on the measure.

Speaking to a meeting of the National League of Cities, Biden colorfully dismissed arguments from gun rights advocates who have opposed the push by the White House and some Senate Democrats to prohibit the sale of assault weapons.

Biden noted that some “real bad, tough warriors,” a reference to retired Army generals Stanley McChrystal and Colin Powell and other former U.S. military brass, have backed reinstating an assault weapons ban.

“As my son (Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden) says, ‘If you want to have an assault weapon, join the military,’” Biden said. “If you want to learn to shoot it, no problem.”

Biden spoke hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee passed two measures designed to curb gun violence.
One of the measures passed the committee along party lines and will expand background checks to private gun sales. The second bill, which had broader bipartisan support, renews a grant program to help schools bolster their security procedures and increased financing for the program by $100 million over the next decade.
The committee, however, delayed plans to vote Tuesday on an assault weapons ban and a bill to limit the size of high-capacity magazines.

Biden said he expects that the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on those measures later this week. Congress passed an assault weapons ban in 1994, but it expired a decade later.

Even before President Obama introduced his gun policy agenda in January, which included a call to reestablish the ban, it faced an uphill fight as even some Senate Democrats have said they would oppose the measure.

But as gun debate reaches a crucial point in the coming days, Biden is keeping up the push for Congress to include some of the more contentious parts of the president’s gun agenda.

To that end, Biden noted the family members of the victims of the December shooting massacre in Connecticut that reignited the gun debate. The vice president has met with a majority of the families who lost a child in the massacre and praised their courage. He called on lawmakers to follow their example.

“I know every time they talk about what happened, it forces them to relive (the incident),” Biden said. “It’s not too much to ask the political establishment of this country to show the same kind of courage — some political courage.”