Then-senator Joe Biden’s signature crime bill had ground its way through Congress after months of tedious effort. But after an unexpected flare-up over guns raised the threat of a filibuster, the lawmaker from Delaware took the Senate floor for an impassioned plea.
“We can vote to keep these deadly military-style assault weapons on the streets, where we know they have one purpose and one purpose only — killing other human beings,” Biden said that evening in November 1993. “Or we can vote to take these deadly military-style assault weapons off our streets. The choice is that simple. The choice is that stark.”
Later that night, after a vote showed a majority of senators wanted to add an assault weapons ban to the bill, he looked at his Republican colleagues and offered a modest taunt: “Why not lose gracefully?”
The assault weapons ban eventually passed, ushering in a dramatic change in the nation’s firearms laws and punctuating a years-long effort from Biden to enact gun control legislation. It would prove to be a seminal moment in his long legislative career, and would help cement his views of how the halting machinery of Congress can address the toughest problems of American society.
But nearly three decades later, as Biden attempts to resurrect that approach and puts an assault weapon ban at the center of his rallying cry on guns, the landscape is radically different. The ban he helped pass expired after 10 years and has never been renewed. As president, Biden is confronting the realities of a Congress that operates much differently and a political dynamic that makes the goal almost impossible to achieve.
U.S. has experienced more than 200 mass shootings this year
Even Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who with Biden led the effort to include the ban in the sweeping 1994 crime bill, is not focusing on a restoration. Instead, she has advocated for a new bill raising the minimum age for the purchase of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines from 18 to 21.
“You know how I feel about this,” Feinstein said after news broke of a shooting in Texas that killed 19 children and two adults. “Every [mass shooting] is sort of like a knife in me because I want people to be safe, and I want people to use these weapons appropriately, and they don’t.” But as for an assault weapons ban, she added, “Whether we have enough support to do something about it, I don’t know.”
But Biden, as he has in the past, has quickly embraced the assault weapons ban as a necessary solution. “It makes no sense to be able to purchase something that can fire up to 300 rounds,” he said on Monday. “The idea of these high-caliber weapons — there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting.”