“White House officials are privately bearish Congress will pass anything substantial to limit guns,” Axios reports.
“Biden aides aren’t under any delusion that a presidential speech will change deeply entrenched and structural obstruction on Capitol Hill.”
“When Sen. McConnell asked me to be sort of the point person on this, I thought to myself ‘well, this is like Joe Biden appointing Kamala Harris border czar,’ I accepted the responsibility with a little trepidation.”
— Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), quoted by Politico, on the bipartisan gun talks, while adding that failure “will be embarrassing.”
“President Biden, in a rare prime-time address Thursday, called on Congress to take immediate action on gun control, seeking to transform emotion and anger into change as the nation reeled from a spate of horrific mass shootings from New York to Texas to Oklahoma,” the Washington Post reports.
“The United States has resisted firearms limits following wrenching murderous attacks that have erupted on an increasingly regular basis over the past few decades, but Biden sought to channel a feeling by some in Washington that this time could be different in the aftermath of a racist massacre and a slaughter at an elementary school that gripped the nation’s attention.”
New York Times: “With the 17-minute address, Mr. Biden abruptly shed the reluctance of his White House to engage in what could become yet another fruitless partisan confrontation, played out amid funerals in Uvalde, Buffalo and Tulsa. After weeks of carefully calibrating his calls for action, the president on Thursday did not hold back.”
Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) blamed abortion for gun violence in a radio interview.
Said Long: “When I was growing up in Springfield, you had one or two murders a year. Now we have two, three, four a week in Springfield, Missouri, so something has happened to our society and I go back to abortion.”
He added: “When we decided it was okay to murder kids in their mother’s wombs, life has no value to a lot of these folks.”
Mona Charen: “Perhaps all of these killers would have been able to lay hands on guns already owned by individuals. Maybe. But it would have been much harder than walking into a gun store. In most cases, these killers are mentally unstable, impulsive, and socially maladroit. Purchasing a weapon via private sale would be more challenging.”
“So making it more difficult to purchase guns—say, by adding more complete background checks, increasing the minimum age to 21, requiring waiting periods, or adopting ‘red flag laws’ that make it possible for family members or police to ask courts to have a person’s guns temporarily removed—would have inhibited the vast majority of the killers listed above.”
Elliot Ackerman: Our narrative of mass shootings is killing us.
President Biden plans to deliver a prime time address on recent mass shootings and urge Congress to pass “commonsense laws” in response, the Washington Post reports.
Politico: “Biden has delivered relatively few prime time addresses to date. Absent his speeches before joint sessions of Congress, he spoke to the nation last March to mark the one-year anniversary of the country shutting down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The speech is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET.
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“The Senate’s bipartisan group considering new gun control measures met Wednesday, and our reporting indicates the talks are progressing at a somewhat quick clip,” Punchbowl News reports.
Said Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME): “We are making rapid progress toward a common sense package that could garner support from both Republicans and Democrats.”
“Rapid progress. That’s not something you hear too often during thorny and complicated legislative negotiations.”
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi said next week she will bring forward legislation to ban military-style assault weapons, as the chamber moves to address gun violence,” CNN reports.
Multiple people were shot and some were killed on Wednesday afternoon at a medical building in Tulsa, the New York Times reports.
The assailant, who was armed with a rifle, was dead.
Susie Linfield: “Photographic images can bring us close to the experience of suffering — and, in particular, to the physical torment that violence creates — in ways that words do not. What does the destruction of a human being, of a human body — frail and vulnerable (all human bodies are frail and vulnerable) — look like? What can we know of another’s suffering? Is such knowledge forbidden — or, alternately, necessary? And if we obtain it, what then?”
Charlie Sykes: “Maybe it’s naïve to think that even the most graphic pictures would really make a difference. But they have in the past. Think about the impact of the photo of Emmitt Till lying in his open casket, a victim of racist violence; or the picture of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack. The picture of a drowned Syrian 3-year-old boy shocked the world into addressing the migrant crisis. After WWII, German citizens were forced to witness the horrors of the concentration camps and the images of the atrocities still haunt our collective conscience.”
“But showing the children may simply be too much. And it’s certainly too much to ask the families of those children.”
Washington Post: “The experience in the District highlights how aggressive tactics to seize guns can exacerbate tensions with communities and collide with the realities of successful prosecutions. To substantiate a case in court, police must show they had legitimate reason to conduct a search and tie a gun to a specific person, which can be a difficult task.”
“And defense attorneys and criminal justice advocates say officers are often stopping young Black men on flimsy pretexts and bringing weak cases in a so-far-unsuccessful effort to quell shootings.”
Politico: “With opinion essentially hardened on guns in rural and urban America, the suburbs have become the political crucible for winning support for more significant restrictions.”
“Yet… even a searing local experience like a school shooting — and even on the last front where activists see tillable political land — activists continue to struggle with translating gun violence into an issue that’s capable of deciding elections.”
Donald Trump Jr. argued over the weekend that guns aren’t to blame for the massacre at a school in Uvalde, Texas, suggesting that the shooter could have killed children “with a bat, or a bomb, or some sort of improvised device, or a machete.”
House Democrats will try to advance a raft of gun-control bills on Thursday in the wake of two high-profile mass shootings that rocked the nation earlier this month, CNBC reports.
“Video obtained by ABC News, taken outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, as last week’s massacre was unfolding inside, appears to capture a 911 dispatcher alerting officers on scene that they were receiving calls from children who were alive inside the classroom that the gunman had entered — as law enforcement continued to wait nearly an hour and a half to enter the room.”
“Amid calls for gun control after last week’s massacre at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, shots rang out across the country over the Memorial Day weekend, with more than a dozen mass shootings in the span of 72 hours,” NBC News reports.
“According to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in the United States, there were at least 14 “mass shootings” in the country over the weekend, from early Saturday to late Monday.”
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) told CNN he was willing for a “conversation” on raising the minimum age to purchase a semiautomatic rifle from 18 to 21 and “AR-15-style weapons” amid fresh talks on gun reform following a deadly mass shooting in Texas last week.
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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