Vice President Joe Biden asked Americans on Friday to pressure Congress to pass gun control legislation, as part of his response to a petition filed on the White House’s “We the People” demanding action after Sunday’s massacre in Orlando, Fla.
“We’ve waged campaign after campaign to turn our grief into action — each time thinking maybe, just maybe, this will be the one that breaks through; this will be the one that gets through to Congress, which must ultimately act,” Biden wrote. “Folks, enough has been enough for a long time.”
“You know that by stepping up, your action has the potential to create a domino effect. Have the courage to do it,” Biden urged people. “Finish this.”
The petition asked the “federal government” to call on Congress to bar the AR-15 rifle from anything but military use. It was started on Monday and on Wednesday it reached the 100,000-signature mark, the threshold at which the Obama administration issues some response.
Biden was careful to say “AR-15-type weapon” in his response because investigators determined that Omar Mateen actually used a modified Sig Sauer MCX rifle to shoot 102 people, 49 of which died during his Islamic State-inspired rampage.
Biden noted that some variation of the AR-15 has been used in most of recent deadly mass shootings carried out by lone gunmen. Those include the shootings in Aurora, Colo., where 72 people were shot at a movie theater, Roseburg, Ore., where 19 students were shot by a classmate at Umpqua Community College, and Newtown, Conn., were 20 first graders and six of their teachers were shot at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“A single person killed that many people in just a few minutes. Not in a war zone. Here in America—in a classroom,” Biden wrote.
Biden called on Congress to reinstate the lapsed federal ban on assault weapons, which he authored as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994, as a start. He also wants lawmakers to require background checks for all potential gun buyers, bar anyone on the government’s “no fly” list from owning a gun and lift the funding freeze on federal gun-violence research, among other things.
