Biden, Obama Talk Tougher on Gun Control 10 Years after Sandy Hook
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – US President Joe Biden said he’d hoped, when he became president, that he wouldn’t “have to do this again.”
Nearly 10 years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in which a shooter killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, Biden delivered remarks on Tuesday in the aftermath of a Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that marked the deadliest school shooting in the decade since, US News reported.
But his seven-minute address to the nation perhaps revealed the distance between the present moment and a decade ago, when his former boss president Barack Obama famously shed tears in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting. The notable difference: Both the president and the former president in their statements Tuesday not only expressed the grief of a nation but – unlike a decade ago – they were not shy in assessing blame.
Biden evoked the heartache of a parent, drawing from his own experience of having suddenly lost loved ones when his wife and 13-month-old daughter were killed in an automobile accident in 1972.
The president – like the rest of America, caught blindsided by the shooting – had few specifics to offer, having spent recent days on an overseas trip weighing international issues like the US response to potential Chinese aggression against Taiwan. Still, after just last week visiting the families of the victims of a racist mass killing in Buffalo, he took a decidedly tougher tone on gun control, demanding that the nation “stand up to the gun lobby” and “do what we all know in our gut needs to be done.”
“For God’s sake, we have to have the courage to stand up to the industry,” Biden said.
Describing the 10 years since Obama addressed the nation over the Sandy Hook shooting, Biden recalled the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, as well as some 900 incidents of shootings at schools, saying “the list goes on and on.”
“I am sick and tired of it,” he said. “It’s time to turn this pain into action.”
Obama conveyed a similar message, writing on Twitter in a not-so-uncommon refrain that “Michelle and I grieve with the families,” but adding starkly: “We’re also angry for them.”
“Nearly 10 years after Sandy Hook and 10 days after Buffalo, our country is paralyzed – not by fear but by a gun lobby and a political party that have shown no willingness to act in any way that might help prevent these tragedies,” Obama said. “It’s long past time for action, any kind of action. And it’s another tragedy – a quieter but no less tragic one – for families to wait another day.”
It was a more pointed message than the brief comments he delivered as president, when his remarks on Sandy Hook steered clear of the gun lobby, the National Rifle Association or the Republican Party.
Both presidents remarked – 10 years apart – at the tragic loss of innocent life, of the “beautiful” little children.
“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” Obama said in 2012. Almost 10 years later, on Tuesday, Biden asked, “Where in God’s name is our backbone?”
The US president said, “It’s time to act.”
Notably, those comments also reflected Obama, who said in his address 10 years ago: “We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”
Little changed in the intervening decade. No significant gun control legislation passed Congress, and – with the barest of majorities in the Senate and an endangered advantage in the House heading into hotly contested midterm elections – Biden’s chances of significant reform look just as grim.
