A speech “to turn emotion and anger into change”. On Thursday evening, US President Joe Biden spoke at prime time, “a rare event” at the White House, to call on Congress to act on guns, notes the Washington Post.
In a vibrant plea, the American president called for a national ban on the sale of semi-automatic assault rifles, as between 1994 and 2004. Aware of the difficulty of adopting such a measure in Congress, where his party does not have than a very narrow majority, he called on Republicans to at least “raise the age” minimum legal age to obtain such weapons, from 18 to 21 years old.
He also called for a ban on high-capacity magazines, the strengthening of criminal or psychological background checks on potential buyers and the vote on a text requiring individuals to keep their weapons locked up. Behind the desk of the American president, the White House had lined up 56 candles representing 50 states and 6 American territories. “A way of symbolizing that the arms epidemic requires a national response”decrypted USA Today.
Biden, “determined” and “optimistic” despite everything
“What Joe Biden asked for” in his speech “full of emotions”, “seems” Nevertheless “unlikely to happen”skeptically notes the Boston Globe.
Under pressure to act after the massacre at Uvalde Elementary School in Texas, elected members of the United States Congress were busy Thursday to find an agreement on a limited framework for firearms. “I support the action […] of a small group of Republican and Democratic senators trying to find a way forward, but my God, the fact that the majority of Republicans in the Senate do not want any of these proposals even to be debated or put to a vote , I find this unacceptable”lambasted in his speech, Joe Biden. “We cannot betray the American people again”he insisted, calling on the Senate to act.
“Biden has been trying to give congressional lawmakers the space to finally find the kind of bipartisan compromise they have so far failed to achieve in the last decades marked by shootings”note it Los Angeles Times. But on Thursday evening, in “rising to the rostrum, he showed himself determined to prove to the country […] his commitment to eradicating an epidemic of gun violence so uniquely American.” For the Californian daily, Joe Biden’s speech also sought to reflect a certain “optimism” : the idea that “even a deeply polarized Congress and Republicans long opposed to gun control, could be spurred to action”.
Shortly after the US President’s speech in Washington, a new shooting broke out in Iowa on Thursday evening. A man shot and killed two women in the parking lot of a church, east of the town of Ames, before turning the gun on himself.