President Joe Biden vehemently called for tighter restrictions on gun sales Friday, marking the 1-year anniversary of the first significant federal law in nearly three decades to regulate them, but noted that this is just an “important first step”. The president urged voters to defeat the lawmakers who resist.
“The prayers are fine. They are important… but they are not going to stop (the massacres),” said Biden, who urged Congress to take stronger measures that restrict access to guns. “You (legislators) have to act. They have to move. They have to do something.”
“If this Congress refuses to act, we need a new Congress,” he added.
Biden praised attendees at a Connecticut gathering on gun safety — attended by numerous shooting survivors and family members of victims — for “giving their grief a useful purpose,” pledging to stick with it. his advocacy for stricter laws.
The president delivered his speech on the anniversary of an initiative last year that tightened access to guns, enacted just weeks after a gunman fatally shot 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. A decade earlier, 26 children and several staff members were killed in the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook School, located less than an hour from Hartford.
Last year’s law toughened background checks on younger gun buyers, sought to prevent people who have committed intimate partner violence from owning firearms, and attempted to help states enact red flag laws that make it easier to take away weapons from people considered dangerous.
Biden cited a number of positive aspects that he said the 2022 law has already influenced.
Increased background checks by the FBI prevented more than 200 sales to people under 21. Prosecutions of unlicensed gun dealers increased, and additional gun-trafficking penalties were handed down in more than 100 cases across the country. Lawsuits against those who sell firearms without a license have doubled.
“If this law had gone into effect a year ago, lives would have been saved,” Biden said.
