A weekend mass shooting in California renewed President Joe Biden’s efforts to enact “commonsense” gun control measures despite Congress repeatedly knocking down legislation he supported.
Biden said that Sunday’s shooting, which killed six and left dozens more injured, left “families forever changed” and forced survivors “to heal wounds both visible and invisible.”
“We know these lives were not the only lives impacted by gun violence last night,” the president wrote in a statement. “We equally mourn for those victims and families who do not make national headlines.”
Biden, reiterating statements made in the past, called on the country to “do more than mourn,” and he yet again called on Congress to pass legislation banning ghost guns, requiring background checks for all gun sales, banning “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, and rolling back immunity for gun manufacturers.
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Furthermore, Biden pressed Congress to pass his budget request for fiscal year 2023, which includes more than $30 billion to fight violent crime and support local law enforcement officers and Department of Justice programs to remove illegal firearms from America’s streets.
Authorities arrested one 26-year-old Dandrae Martin in connection to the Sacramento shooting and are still hunting for multiple other suspects. Police said at least three buildings and three cars were hit in the shooting and that more than 100 bullet casings were recovered at the scene.
Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert noted that Martin is being charged with assault with a firearm and illegal possession of a firearm. He has been wanted in Riverside County since 2015 after twice violating probation related to a past domestic violence charge.
The president has used some executive authority to address gun violence. In 2021, he directed the Justice Department to stand up five special task forces in metropolitan areas across the country to track illegal sales and transfers of firearms and get them off the street where possible. However, meaningful change would likely require congressional intervention.
Biden’s focus on guns comes as Democrats seek to reinvigorate voters heading into the midterm elections. Crime consistently ranks as a top concern for voters of both parties, and multiple party officials expressed frustration to the Washington Examiner about Congress’s inability to follow through on Biden’s proposals after 2021 saw roughly a dozen mass shootings across the country.
The Democratic-controlled House passed two gun control bills endorsed by the White House last year, but both eventually died in the Senate.
“It shouldn’t need to take another senseless act of violence to force lawmakers to take action,” one Democratic official said of Sunday’s shooting in Sacramento. “Atlanta. Indianapolis. Boulder. This is a national epidemic that doesn’t impact either party any more than the other. Congress must act, and they must act now.”
A second official specifically said West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Senate Republicans presented “roadblocks” to passing reforms, a sentiment echoed by Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action.
“It is a 50-50 Senate,” she said in a statement to the Sacramento Bee. “And so people who are working on a variety of issues are frustrated about how difficult it is to pass anything through the Senate. It is intractable.”
Still, Biden’s gun violence campaign could receive a huge boost from one of the Democrats’ top messengers on Tuesday when former President Barack Obama returns to the White House for the first time since January 2017.
Obama has said his biggest regret from his two terms as president was failing to do more to address gun violence.
“If you ask me where has been the one area where I feel that I’ve been most frustrated and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient commonsense gun safety laws,” he said in a 2015 interview with CNN. “If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that has been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands. For us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing, but it is not something that I intend to stop working on in the remaining 18 months.”
Furthermore, according to YouGov, Obama remains Democrats’ most popular politician five years after leaving office. Biden, on the other hand, only ranks fifth, behind former President Jimmy Carter, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Vice President Al Gore.
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Obama will join Biden for an event promoting Obamacare. The White House did not answer inquiries on whether Biden and Obama will speak about the “epidemic” of gun violence at the event, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday that the pair would also have lunch Tuesday afternoon and “talk about events in the world.”
