As pressure mounts on Republicans and Democrats to introduce gun control in the wake of the Texas elementary school massacre and a racist attack in Buffalo, New York, US president Joe Biden said that he owns firearms.
“I’m a gun owner. I own two shotguns. The point I’m making is that the Second Amendment is not absolute,” Biden was quoted as saying by news agency Bloomberg. The US president was addressing donors at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Los Angeles on Friday.
He also ridiculed the idea proposed by Republicans to arm teachers and increase police presence inside the schools.
“The idea we’re going to provide — the way to deal with gun safety is to provide teachers with guns in classrooms? There’s a reason why the military takes so long to train somebody. It’s not easy to pick up a rifle or a gun and blow somebody’s brains out,” Biden said.
Many teachers in the US also dismissed the idea saying that this is not a solution to the problem. “If they cared at all, something would have been done. It would have been done after Columbine,” a teacher, Jim Gard, in Broward county, Florida, who survived the 2018 Parkland school shooting was quoted as saying by news agency the Guardian.
“There have been armed teachers and armed security in schools since Columbine and not once has it made a difference,” another high school teacher from Houston, Texas told the news agency.
The House of Representatives passed a law this week which bars the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under age 21 as well as a ban on large-capacity magazines.
Some additional measures were also added where guns could be temporarily taken away from people deemed to be dangerous.
The bills, however, face an uphill battle in the US Senate which remains evenly divided on party lines.
When Joe Biden was the vice-president in 2013, he pushed for gun-safety measures and at that time, according to an ABC News report, Biden said that he owned a 20-gauge shotgun and a 12-gauge shotgun.
Biden also ridiculed the proposal to arm teachers in school in 2013. “We don’t want rent-a-cops in schools armed. We don’t want people in schools who aren’t trained like police officers,” Biden said in 2013.
(with inputs from Bloomberg and ABC News)
Read all the Latest News , Breaking News , watch Top Videos and Live TV here.
Comments
0 comment