In the wake of a mass killing at a Nashville school that left six dead, President Biden said there isn’t anything more he can do on gun control but beseech Congress to pass more stringent legislation.
“I have gone the full extent of my executive authority, on my own,” Biden said before leaving the White House Tuesday for a speech in North Carolina.
“I can’t do anything except plead with Congress to act,” he added.
During his speech later Tuesday afternoon in Durham, the president elaborated on what the country must do in the wake of the deadly rampage in Tennessee, saying the nation owes more to the parents of children lost to gun violence than just “our prayers.” The president — who reiterated his call on Republicans in Congress to pass an assault weapons ban — said there’s a “moral price to pay for inaction.”
“What in God’s name are we doing?” Biden asked.
“I never thought, when I started my public life, that guns would be the number one killer of children in America.”
The comments came one day after a shooter armed with two AR-style weapons and a handgun killed three students and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville. Police identified the shooter as Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, of Nashville. Hale was shot and killed by police who responded to the Covenant School, a small academy housed within a Presbyterian church that serves about 200 students from preschool through sixth grade.
John Drake, chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said law enforcement officials were working to determine a motive and that Hale had attended the school. A “manifesto” and maps for the school were recovered from Hale’s home, Drake said.
Nashville police initially said the shooter was a woman, and then later said Hale was transgender, citing a social media post in which Hale used masculine pronouns. The Post has not yet confirmed how Hale identified.
Biden noted that a majority of U.S. gun owners agree that the country needs stronger gun-control laws. The president pointed out that bipartisan work on gun control is possible, referring to a gun-control law passed last year that received support from both sides of the aisle.
Fifteen Republicans in the Senate joined Democrats last year in passing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which passed the House along party lines. The legislation combined modest new gun restrictions with $15 billion in new federal funding for mental health programs and school security upgrades. Among the new restrictions was closing the “boyfriend loophole” that enabled some people with criminally violent records to continue purchasing weapons under federal law.
While that measure was the most significant law of its kind passed in three decades, Biden conceded on Tuesday it does not do everything that he wants. Biden said that while there’s still more to learn about the Nashville shooting, there’s plenty “we do know”: that this is a family’s “worst nightmare.”
“As a nation, we owe these families more than our prayers,” Biden said. “We owe them action.”
The president reminded the crowd that he is a “Second Amendment guy” who owns two shotguns. Still, he believes there should be a limit on the kind of weapons Americans are able to own. “Everybody thinks somehow the Second Amendment is absolute,” Biden said.
“You’re not allowed to own a machine gun. You’re not allowed to have a flamethrower. You’re not allowed on so many other things. Why, in God’s name, do we allow these weapons of war on our streets and in our schools?”