President Joe Biden said Wednesday during a CNN town hall that he is “continuing to push to eliminate” 9mm handguns, in addition to rifles, that are able to fire multiple rounds.
“I’m the only guy that ever got — passed legislation when I was a senator to make sure we eliminated assault weapons,” the president said. “The idea you need a weapon that can have the ability to fire 20, 30, 40, 50, 120 shots from that weapon, whether it’s a, whether it’s a 9mm pistol or whether it’s a rifle, is ridiculous.”
“I’m continuing to push to eliminate the sale of those things, but I’m not likely to get that done in the near term,” Biden continued.
Biden claimed that crime rates are down, but gun violence and murder rates are up.
“So here’s what I’ve done. The people who in fact are using those weapons are acquiring them illegally. Illegally,” Biden said. “So what happens is: I’ve got an ATF – Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – I have them increase their budget and increase their capacity, along with the Justice Department, to go after the gun shops that are not abiding by the law of doing background checks.”
Biden went on to attack “ghost guns,” which are homemade firearms that lack a traceable seal. He also said communities need “more policemen, not fewer policemen,” contradicting the “defund the police” movement which was widely endorsed by Democrat lawmakers.
“There’s also a thing called ghost guns that are being sold now and being used. And so but in addition to that, what we have to do is we have to deal with a larger problem of the whole issue of law enforcement generally, we’re in a situation where as much as we need to pass the Floyd Act and all that, but here’s the deal. Cops are having real trouble,” Biden said.
“They’re not all bad guys, there are a lot of good guys. We need more policemen, not fewer policemen. But we need them involved in community policing, community policing. And when we did that, violent crime went down, all the criticism about the original crime, but guess what, crime went down until we stopped doing community policing.”
“So it’s about getting, we have availability now, of over, billion, lots of money, for cops to be able to hire psychologists, psychiatrists, as well as social workers to be engaged in the process,” Biden concluded.
