President Joe Biden Tuesday renewed his call for Congress to pass an assault weapons ban — even as he recognizes the limits of his own powers to do anything without Legislative approval.
Biden raised the issue as he left the White House for North Carolina after speaking about the Nashville school shooting at a pre-scheduled event Monday.
“I have exercised the full extent of my executive authority on my own. I think it’s about time,” Biden told reporters at the White House.
“Congress must act. The majority of Americans want a ban on assault weapons,” he continued. “I can do nothing but ask Congress to act.”
President Joe Biden said he had achieved the “full extent of my executive authority” and called on Congress to enact a ban on assault weapons. A previous ban on assault weapons lasted a decade and expired in 2004
His pleas come as key lawmakers are already expressing doubts about the ability to move legislation — even after a gunman at Covenant School killed six, most recently in a series of mass shootings at schools, places of worship, malls and other locations .
Support for reinstating the expired ban appears to be waning — though the White House cites an increase in mass shootings since it was allowed to expire in 2004.
Support stood at 47 percent compared to 51 percent opposed in an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last month. That was a sharp drop from 2019, including a 9-point drop in support for a ban and a 10-point rise against it.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday renewed her call for congressional Republicans to get behind an assault weapons ban bill — after top-level lawmakers expressed doubts there was enough support to follow the shooting to take major new action in the Nashville school.
“We need gun safety laws, comprehensive gun safety laws. We must ban assault rifles, these weapons of war do not belong on our streets,” she told MSNBC on Tuesday. “They don’t belong in schools… It’s unacceptable. You will continue to hear the President exclaim this,” she said.
She spoke a day after saying “enough is enough” at the White House following the Nashville tragedy, and the same day authorities released chilling bodycam footage of the shooting that killed six people.
Jean-Pierre was speaking on the White House grounds after Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who helped negotiate the biggest gun legislation in years last Congress, said there was little appetite to do more legislation after more shootings.
Biden spoke a day after the Nashville school shooting. An entrance to Covenant School has become a memorial to the victims
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called for “comprehensive gun safety legislation” and renewed her call for a ban on assault weapons following the Nashville school shooting
“I would say we’ve gone as far as we can go, unless someone identifies an area that we haven’t addressed,” Cornyn said Monday. He was specifically asked if he could take additional steps on background checks for gun buyers.
Jean-Pierre dismissed this stance in a separate interview on CNN. “We shouldn’t say there’s nothing else to do. We should try to find out what else we can do,’ she said.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who helped write the original ban and is scheduled to retire in 2024, published an analysis of academic studies in 2019 showing that deaths from mass shootings decreased when the ban was in place and jumped , when it expired.
Discussing her own family, Jean-Pierre said she “just gave my 8-year-old a little tighter hug” after the news. “I was one of the lucky ones. Like many Americans, I was one of the lucky ones last night. You know why? My daughter came home from school. So that’s what we live with as a country,” she said.
She repeated a message from Monday: “Enough, enough, enough.” We had a president who responded to that,” she said after being pressed on whether President Biden was planning new executive action.
“I know you asked me about executive action, what else can we do? This president has taken more executive action to protect against gun violence than any president before him,” she said.
“We need Republicans in Congress to show some courage. You owe it to these parents. They owe it to those family members who are losing loved ones.”
Any legislative action would need majority support in the House of Representatives and clear a 60-vote hurdle in the Senate where Republicans and gun rights advocates can launch a filibuster, making the reenactment of the Clinton-era assault weapons ban an extremely difficult affair makes elevator.
The shooting took place in the congressional district of GOP Rep. Andy Ogles, who is calling for a focus on mental health rather than banning semi-automatic assault rifles like the AR-15.
President Joe Biden spoke Monday at the White House about the school shootings in Nashville
Children hold hands as they exit Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday after a gunman opened fire, killing three children and three staff members
“I would say we’ve gone as far as we can go, unless someone identifies an area that we haven’t addressed,” said Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn
Without a clear legislative path, Jean-Pierre repeatedly goes on the airwaves to call for school safety. “We can no longer sit around to allow this to happen. You know kids should be able to go to school and be safe. Teachers should go to school and be able to teach. Again, we don’t see this anywhere else in the world except here,” she said.
In an interview with CNN, she criticized the House Judiciary Committee for delaying a resolution that would repeal a rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives under Biden that would set criteria for the stabilization of braces that lead to it that guns work in a way like guns did in the Las Vegas mass shooting.
“When you hear elected officials say that’s another topic of conversation, when the President says we need to do more, that’s also devastating to hear because that’s what you’re also saying to the families who’ve lost loved ones, to those Parents who lost three 9 year olds. They lost their children yesterday, and is that what we mean?’
“We shouldn’t say there’s nothing else to do. We should try to find out what else we can do,” said Jean-Pierre.