Vice President Joe Biden, in somber, highly personal remarks to a gala fundraising dinner for the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shootings, lamented the gun control gridlock in Washington that he partly blamed for the Orlando terrorist massacre over the weekend.
Biden told the crowd gathered at the Andrew W. Mellon auditorium in Washington that he and President Obama have talked about the shooting that killed 20 first-graders back in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary as one of the most painful moments of their tenure.
“That maybe was the saddest day of our entire administration — when it took so many innocent, beautiful little lives,” he said. “You would have thought several years later that on matters relating to rational gun safety we would have made some progress by now. But Virginia Tech, Oak Creek, Charleston, San Bernardino and now Orlando…”
Recalling how it took seven years for him to pass the Biden crime bill that included an assault weapons ban in 1994 and overcome stiff resistance from gun-owners around the country and Delaware, he said he could only get enough votes to pass it if he agreed to a 10-year authorization.
When that authorization expired and President George W. Bush didn’t extend it, he said he was deeply disappointed and wished former Vice President Al Gore had would won his legal challenge against Bush after the contested results of the 2000 election.
“Had Al Gore won that election — I think he won it any way — a lot would be different. We would still have that in place … and God only knows how many lives would be changed,” he said.
Biden said there are several “commonsense” steps Congress could take that would help avoid a gun getting into the wrong hands or only allow it to be fired by the person who purchased it, but pressure from the NRA has shut them down.
“This borders on the irrational — where we are,” he said.
But Biden said he and others like the families of the Sandy Hook victims “refuse to give up.”
“There’s no reason we should ever stop,” he said. “The idea that you could be on the ‘no-fly’ list … and still be able to guy [a gun] … what are these guys and women thinking?” he asked, referring to senators opposed to measures that would close that loophole.
There may be reason to think that after the Orlando attacks, gun control could gain traction this week, he said, referring to Democrats’ current filibuster of an appropriations bill in order to win consideration of a bill that attempts to close the “no-fly” list loophole.
He also thanked Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., for standing up to the powerful gun lobby in their states to try to reintroduce a bill that would place stiffer background checks on private party firearm sales. That bipartisan compromise failed to overcome a procedural hurdle in the Senate just four months after the Sandy Hook shootings.
He also promised to continue pushing for gun control measures after leaving office at the end of the year.
Because he has spent most of his adult life in federal office he joked, “I don’t know what the hell else to do. But I promise you, I will be part of your ranks. I will be contributing … to ensure that we eventually get this done.”
Earlier, in a particularly emotional set of remarks, he commiserated with the crowd for belonging to a “lousy, stinking club — that as a parent you have a child, for whatever reason, pre-decease you.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything more difficult than that,” he said. “But I want to say to the families of Sandy Hook — all those of you who have been through hell. I cannot tell you how much I admire our courage.”
He spoke in detail about the death of his wife and daughter in an accident involving a tractor-trailer when they were buying Christmas presents many years ago, at the beginning of his congressional career.
At the time, he said he avoided taking up the cause of greater highway safety in Congress but it was too painful for him because he would been forced to relive the moment he got the phone call telling him of their deaths over and over again.
“I was in a position of some power but I couldn’t bring myself to do it,” he said.
Biden also recounted the difficulty he faced late last year when he decided not to run for president after the death of his son Beaux.
When Obama joined him in the Rose Garden for his announcement that he had decided not to run for president last year, he said he didn’t know that the president was going to put him in charge of the Cancer Moonshot project with the goal of finding cures to cancer.
“The next thing I knew,” he recalled, Obama was announcing that he was heading up the Moonshot effort.
“If the president had asked me if I wanted to do this,” he said he probably would have “been a coward as well and said I don’t want to do this,” Biden said, because it would immerse him in a fight that would bring back so many memories of Beaux’s cancer battle.
Even earlier Wednesday while huddling with cabinet secretaries planning for an upcoming Cancer Moonshot summit, Biden said he had “trouble getting through the meeting” because “every time we talk specifics, I think about my Beaux … I remember the struggle we went through with Beaux when he was dying.”
“But it just made me realize what an incredible group of people you are — the Sandy Hook Promise and all of you who are supporting them,” he said, going on to thank them for their work on trying to educate students and teachers about early warnings signs of students and others who may be experiencing mental health issues that could lead to perpetrating a mass shooting.
“Thank you for your courage … I love you for what you’re doing,” he concluded.
