Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. meeting with law enforcement officials in Washington a week after the Connecticut massacre.
Mr. Biden, then a Delaware senator in a dark-horse bid for the White House, shook his head. “I tell you what, if that’s his baby, he needs help,” he said. “I think he just made an admission against self-interest. I don’t know if he’s mentally qualified to own that gun.”
The candidate’s blunt, dismissive remark cheered one side of America’s long-polarized debate about guns and alienated the other. But it overlooked the salient reality that the rifle-toting voter was able to buy it legally even under a law that theoretically banned assault weapons and was co-written by Mr. Biden.
Five years later, that same type of weapon, a Bushmaster AR-15, is at the heart of a renewed national conversation about gun laws because it was used this month by the mass killer in Newtown, Conn. For Mr. Biden, now the vice president, the moment offers a second chance as he drafts a legislative response for President Obama that would reinstate his expired assault weapons ban, while also applying lessons from the last time around to make it more effective.
A president intent on pressing Congress to restrict access to high-powered guns could hardly find a more seasoned figure to take charge of the effort. Mr. Biden, who owns two shotguns, brings decades of experience and plenty of scar tissue from past battles with the National Rifle Association to frame recommendations that Mr. Obama wants ready by next month.
“He’s basically been doing this for a little over 30 years,” said former Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, a longtime Biden adviser who was appointed to fill out his term. “I really do believe there isn’t anybody in America who has a better chance of getting this done by Jan. 15 than he does, not just because of his background in guns but because he’s not politically intimidated by the N.R.A., to put it mildly.”
As far as the N.R.A. is concerned, Mr. Biden is an ideologue whose mind is already made up about the “conversation” he is now supposed to lead.
“This is somebody who’s bombastic and really does think that anybody who disagrees with him is not only wrong but crazy,” David Keene, the N.R.A. president, said in an interview. “That’s his style.”
Mr. Biden, he added, has not reached out to his group and has shown contempt for gun owners who value their Second Amendment rights. “His debate response and how he’s acted as a legislator indicates that he not only doesn’t understand it but doesn’t have any desire to understand it,” Mr. Keene said. “Joe is not a nuance character. He knows what he knows, and he doesn’t need to be told that other people think differently than he does.”
What Mr. Biden knows is that gun control is not only a fiercely emotional topic for many Americans but also a tricky area for legislation. The assault weapons ban he helped pass in 1994 was written narrowly enough that it allowed plenty of guns to still be sold. Moreover, a 10-year expiration clause was added as a compromise. Democrats went on to lose control of Congress that fall, a defeat that many attributed to the gun law, leaving the party skittish ever since.
This time, Mr. Biden wants to tighten the strictures, but to succeed he needs to get legislation through a Republican-controlled House. And even if he and Mr. Obama can persuade Congress to ban the sale of new semiautomatic rifles, more than three million AR-15 rifles are already in private hands, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
First elected to the Senate in 1972, Mr. Biden had a long interest in passing crime legislation, and gun control eventually became part of his proposals. An assault weapons ban he wrote in the 1980s failed in Congress, but by 1994, as he put together a comprehensive crime package, a new Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein of California, wanted to try again. Burned after so many failures, Mr. Biden was skeptical.
“When I told Joe Biden, who was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that I was going to move this as an amendment on the crime bill, he laughed at me,” Ms. Feinstein recalled this month on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “He said, ‘You’re new here. Wait till you learn.’ ”
Newtown Task Force Returns Biden to Gun Control Arena
This article
Newtown Task Force Returns Biden to Gun Control Arena
can be opened in url
http://drummernewster.blogspot.com/2012/12/newtown-task-force-returns-biden-to-gun.html
Newtown Task Force Returns Biden to Gun Control Arena
