In the seemingly endless push to pass new gun control measures, Vice President Joe Biden made an appeal yesterday to some of the nation’s top law enforcement officials in a meeting at the Executive Office Building in Washington:
“We have to have a comprehensive way in which to respond to the mass murder of our children that we saw in Connecticut,” said Vice President Joe Biden today, meeting with the leaders of law enforcement organizations whom he said had been his “friends and allies for over 35 years.”The vice president convened the first meeting of his interagency commission to examine possible actions to prevent the next gun violence tragedy like the one that befell Sandy Hill Elementary School.“We’re going to need your help,” he said to the group, suggesting he wants them to help push for a reinstatement of the 1994 ban on some types of semiautomatic assault rifles, more colloquially known as the “assault weapons ban,” which expired in 2004. That ban was part of the larger Crime Bill, which Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, helped draft.“We see no reason why the assault weapons ban — quite frankly, you guys helped me write in the original crime bill. It passed the Senate then didn’t get past the House. And then we went back at it again with (Senator) Dianne Feinstein’s leadership, she convinced people to put it back in the bill.”
The Assault Weapons Ban was intially part of the package being pushed by Majority Leader Harry Reid. However, he later removed it because it put the entire package in jeopardy. The proposal was offered by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) as an amendment earlier this month to the gun control legislation offered in the Senate. It failed by vote of 40 to 60.
A memo from National Institute of Justice — the research arm of the Department of Justice — noted that the Assault Weapons Ban is “unlikely to have an impact on gun violence” because the weapons targeted by White House and Feinstein “are not a major contributor to US gun homicide.”
So not only does the Assault Weapons Ban stand next to no chance at passage, it’s not going to do much, if anything, to prevent incidents of gun violence. Why are the pushing this worthless measure, again?
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