After the Nashville mass shooting, President Joe Biden comes back to one word
BY PHILIP ELLIOTT
THERE IS ONE WORD IN JOE BIDEN’S VOCABULARY that he surely wishes he could purge: again.
It’s been a constant during his two-plus years as President and his eight as the understudy. Over that time, Biden has repeatedly had to shoehorn again into his planned remarks on other subjects, to pepper it into hastily called statements from a White House podium or en route to another event.
“You know, the shooter in this situation reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol—two AK-47,” Biden said on March 27 in the White House’s East Room, where he was forced to preface his speech to the Small Business Administration’s summit for women with an update on the school shooting earlier that day in Nashville. “So, I call on Congress, again,” he said, “to pass my assault-weapons ban. It’s about time that we begin to make some more progress.”
Progress will be hard to find. Detour, much easier. And Biden knows it. School shootings, music-festival massacres, and grocery-store slaughters alike have been unable to soften Americans’ sclerosis when it comes to gun rights.
Since Biden took office in early 2021, there have been more than 50,000 deaths by gun violence, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Since Jan. 1, 2021, there have been 1,468 mass shootings—defined as four or more people shot, not including the shooter—or 1.8 each day. The March 27 shooting in Nashville that left three students, the head of the private school, a janitor, and a substitute teacher dead was only the latest to seize headlines. Police are trying to piece together the motives behind the 28-year-old perpetrator’s attack on the 200-student Covenant School, but officials noted a doctor had been treating the attacker for an emotional disorder—a fact that did not block the recent legal purchase of seven firearms.
Biden has repeatedly deployed again as a drumbeat in his remarks, a bit of venting and self-flagellation. “I am determined once again to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” he said during a visit to a Monterey Bay, Calif., Boys and Girls Club two weeks before the Nashville shooting. Back in January, he was hammering the point, too: “We’re going to ban assault weapons again. I did it once as a Senator. We’re going to do it again.”
Biden was talking about the 1994 Crime Bill, which banned assault weapons for 10 years. The votes weren’t there in Congress to renew it in 2004, in large part because Democrats, who blamed their shellacking in the wake of the bill’s passage—the House had a net
