Washington—US President Joe Biden on Wednesday led a moment of silence at a vigil for victims of gun violence and urged a ban on military style weapons commonly used in mass shootings.
Biden addressed the Annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence at a Washington, DC, church, saying that the increasingly frequent mass shootings are tearing the country apart.
It’s “violence that rips at the very soul, at the very soul of this nation,” a somber Biden said.
Reflecting on his own family tragedy, including losing his first wife and infant daughter in a car accident, then one of his sons to cancer, Biden said he could empathize with survivors of mass murders, like the 2012 massacre in a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school that left 26 people dead. Twenty of them were children aged six or seven.
“Everyone’s different but I know that feeling. You know, it’s like a black hole in the middle of your chest. You’re being dragged into it. You never know where there’s a way out,” the visibly moved president said.
Biden noted that in his first two years in office he had managed to get Congress to pass the “most significant gun law passed in 30 years but it’s still not enough.” The law expands background checks and reinforces measures to get firearms out of the hands of potentially dangerous people.
Biden again called for resurrecting a far stricter law which expired in 2004, banning military style rifles with large capacity magazines. This would include the AR-15 rifle,...
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