Vice President Kamala Harris placed the onus on Congress to address the issue of gun control following multiple mass shootings in recent weeks.
During an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that aired on Sunday, Harris argued that guns were a priority for President Joe Biden’s administration, but she said that Congress needs to focus on the topic in order for there to be meaningful change.
Roughly two weeks after Biden took a number of executive actions on gun control issues, Bash pushed Harris on why “infrastructure is the next big legislative priority” and not firearms.
“We actually, as an administration, have taken action,” Harris said. “There is only so much, however, that a president can do through executive action.”
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“Congress has to act,” the vice president said, later arguing, “We should have background checks. That’s just reasonable gun safety laws. We should have an assault weapons ban. Assault weapons have been designed to kill a lot of people quickly. They are weapons of war, and Congress has to act, Dana.”
Harris explained that after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, she thought Congress would act, but “it didn’t happen.”
On April 8, Biden took a number of executive actions on gun control issues, including combating “ghost guns.” But he has made a similar argument concerning the limits of his power.
“I’m not going to exercise executive authority where it’s a question, where I can come along and say, ‘I can do away with assault weapons,'” he said in leaked audio of a December conversation with civil rights leaders. “There’s no executive authority to do away with that. And no one has fought harder to get rid of assault weapons than me, me, but you can’t do it by executive order. We do that, next guy comes along and says, ‘Well, guess what? By executive order, I guess everybody can have machine guns again.’ So we gotta be careful.”
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Harris’s comments come after several recent mass shootings in recent weeks. On April 15, eight people were killed after a gunman opened fire at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. Last month, a gunman in a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket opened fire in the store, killing 10 people.
