After mass shootings at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs on Saturday and a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, on Tuesday, 11 people were killed, Joe Biden said on Thursday.
Biden told reporters he would try to pass some form of gun control before a new Congress is seated in January, possibly renewing his attempt to ban assault weapons while visiting a firehouse in Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, to thank first responders on Thanksgiving.
The idea that semi-automatic weapons can still be purchased is sick. It is sick. It has zero, no social redeeming value. Biden said there was not a single single rationale for it except profits for gun manufacturers.
I am going to try. Biden said he was going to try to get rid of assault weapons.
The killings in Colorado Springs and Chesapeake are just two of the more than 600 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Other mass shootings have occurred throughout the country over the past week. On Sunday, four people in Oklahoma were shot dead at a marijuana farm. On Friday, a mother and her three children were killed in Richmond, Virginia.
The president s efforts to ban assault weapons will get even more difficult next year with Republicans controlling the House of RepresentativesHouse of Representatives.
In July, the Democratic-controlled House passed an assault weapons ban, but it was doomed in the Senate.
The last time the legislature passed an assault weapons ban was in 1994. A 2019 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery showed the number of mass shooting deaths declined while the law expired in 2004.
Biden called the two owners of the Colorado Springs nightspot Club Q, Nic Grzecka and Matthew Haynes, on Thursday to offer condolences after the attack on their venue and thank them for their contributions to the community, the White House said.
I would rather be spit on in the street than the hate get as bad as where we are today. Florida s Republican-dominated legislature passed a bill banning teachers from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation with younger students earlier this year. A month later, references to pedophiles and grooming in relation to LGBTQ people went up 400%, according to a report by the Human Rights Campaign.
Grzecka said that Lying about our community, and making them into something they are not, creates a different kind of hate.
Biden also addressed the mass shooting in Chesapeake, where a Walmart supervisor shot six co-workers on Tuesday before turning the gun on himself.
He said that there are now more tables across the country that will have empty seats this Thanksgiving because of another horrific and senseless act of violence.
A witness said that the Walmart gunman appeared to target specific people.
Jessica Wilczewski told the Associated Press that workers had arrived in a store break room to begin their overnight shift late on Tuesday when team leader Andre Bing opened fire with a handgun. Wilczewski said she saw Bing target certain people, while another witness described him as shooting wildly.
Wilczewski told the Associated Press on Thursday that he was going hunting, the way he was acting. He was picking people out, the way he was looking at people's faces and the way he did what he did.