Biden to Congress one year after Buffalo shooting: ‘For God’s sake, do something’

President Biden in an op-ed published one year after 10 people were killed in a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York pleaded for Congress to act on gun control legislation.

The shooting in Buffalo, where a gunman used an AR-15 style rifle to target Black customers, was followed the next week by the shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead. 

“Jill and I visited both communities, spending hours with hundreds of family members who lost pieces of their soul and whose lives will never be the same,” Biden said in the op-ed in USA Today on Sunday. “They had one message for all of us: Do something. For God’s sake, do something.”

Biden called on Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, two measures that have little chance of moving through the legislature with a slim Democratic majority in the Senate and a Republican-controlled House. The president also called for bills to mandate that gun owners securely store their weapons and background checks for all gun sales, also calling for action at the state level.

Biden touted the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was the first federal gun safety legislation enacted in nearly three decades, passed and signed in the wake of the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings. The law extended background checks for gun buyers under 21 and offered funding for expanded red flag laws at the state level.

The president said the law has helped stop more than 160 guns from getting into the hands of “potentially dangerous” hands, and said the Justice Department has used it to charge more than 60 people with gun trafficking and illegally purchasing firearms.

The plea from the president also comes after a string of mass shootings in the country have rocked a number of communities. Earlier this month, a man armed with an assault rifle opened fire at a shopping mall in the Dallas, Texas, area and killed eight people.

But in the wake of that shooting, and others in places like Tennessee and Kentucky, the debate over gun control in Washington has hit usual snags, with many Republicans insisting that tighter gun legislation would not solve the issue.

“Gun violence is mobilizing an entire generation of young people,” Biden said. “But we cannot sit back and pass this problem off to the next generation to solve. If we wait, too many of them will never have the chance to grow up.”

He ended the op-ed with a message to Congress: “For God’s sake, do something.”