Former Vice President Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in the New York Times Sunday promising a new assault weapons ban, should he be elected.
Biden takes hits at Senate Republicans in the piece. “When you have that kind of broad public support for legislation that will make everyone safer, and it still can’t get through the Senate — the problem is with weak-willed leaders who care more about their campaign coffers than children in coffins,” he wrote.
Though he promises the passage of the bill — along with banning high capacity magazines, expanding background checks and developing smart gun technology — he does not explain how he’d do so if Republicans, say, hold the Senate in 2020.
“If we cannot rise to meet this moment, it won’t just be a political failure,” Biden writes. “It will be a moral one. It will mean that we accept the next inevitable tragedy. That we are desensitized to children running from schools and bodies littering parking lots, that our outpouring of thoughts and prayers will grow increasingly hollow.”
