Democratic presidential primary front-runner Joe Biden penned an op-ed in the New York Times on Monday, calling military-style firearms a threat to America’s national security and pledging to ban them if he’s elected president in 2020.
“We have a huge problem with guns,” Biden wrote. “Assault weapons — military-style firearms designed to fire rapidly — are a threat to our national security, and we should treat them as such.”
The former vice president cited his work on the 1994 crime bill that banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines for 10 years, legislation seen today as controversial for its effect on minority communities and contributing to the militarization of police in America.
Biden vowed to stop gun manufacturers from “circumventing the law” by making minor modifications to their products and introduce a gun buyback program to get as many assault weapons “off our streets as possible as quickly as possible.”
He lamented that shortly after the 1994 legislation passed, the National Rifle Association and the pro-gun lobby in Washington, D.C. put Republican lawmakers “in a headlock.”
“Republican leaders try to prevent action and parrot NRA. messaging — as Donald Trump did last week when he said, ‘mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun,'” Biden said. “This is the same president who during his first year in office repealed a rule President Barack Obama and I put in place to help keep guns out of the hands of people with certain mental illnesses.This is the same president who said after Charlottesville that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ and who continues to fan the flames of hate and white supremacy. We can’t trust his diagnosis.”
A racist attack by a gunman in El Paso that left nearly two dozen people dead last week has reignited a debate about Trump’s anti-illegal immigration rhetoric, a focal point of Biden’s attacks on Trump in the early going of the primary election.
It was the just the latest mass shooting in America, where nearly 1,200 people have died in similar attacks over the last half-century, according to the Washington Post.
Racist domestic terrorists inspired by ballooning political tensions with access to deadly weapons is a recipe for disaster, Biden warned.
“It’s unacceptable that children learn to fear mass shooters alongside their ABCs, that people feel unsafe on their weekly grocery run, and that families everywhere experience increasing anxiety that they are simply not safe anywhere in the United States,” he said. “We have to get these weapons of war off our streets.”
