I just received this via email from the press pool. This is from the 11:45 AM: Sportsmen and Women and Wildlife Interest Groups meeting listed in today's GRE, and before the NRA and "gun groups" meeting.
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Below is your pooler's transcript of Biden's remarks. Ellipses are included where the pool audio did not pick up his words.
"Let me begin by
thanking you all for being here. You represent the bulk of the sportsmen
in this country and you all know this is a complicated issue. There is
no singular solution to how we deal with the crime
that happened up in Newtown, or in Colorado, or in the general gun
violence that takes place in America today. The President and I and the
Cabinet understand that it’s a complicated issue.
"That’s why the
President asked me to do this in conjunction with my colleagues in the
cabinet. What we did was put together a pretty extensive list what we
considered the stakeholders in wanting to deal with the
issue of gun violence in America. The first groups we met with will not
surprise you…all the national law enforcement organizations. But also
just to give you a sense of what we have done so far… We have met with
the medical community, the Academy of Family
Physicians, the Academy of Neurology, Pediatrics, etc, a group of about
15 leading medical doctors who represent an organization across the
country… We’ve met with at risk youth, and children advocacy groups from
the After School Alliance, to Promise America,
to Boys and Girls Clubs, because part of this is cultural as well as it
is the actual weapons themselves. We have met with the domestic
violence prevention community.
"We’ve met with
justice organizations like the ABA . . . the National Legal Aide and
Defense Association, prosecutors. We’ve met with civil rights
organizations. We’ve met with national service organizations… Kiwanis,
Rotary International. We’ve met with youth groups. We’ve met with gun
safety advocates. Yesterday that meeting took place here. Probably best
known is the Brady Campaign, but also a dozen other organizations that
are concerned about gun safety. And then we
met with educators and parents from the school boards to the state
school officers associations, we met a dozen or so of those folks. And
then one of the most important things we have been focusing on is the
mental health community. The American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Mental Health of America, the National
Empowerment Center, the National Council of Community Behavioral Health
Centers, because there is an argument among health providers that this
is a major component, to deal with particularly
a lot of suicides as well that we see today.
"And yesterday we
finished up in this room with I think it was 17 members of the faith
community, which in all the years I have been doing this, the first time
there has been an overwhelming consensus, from the
evangelical groups nationwide, and particularly those in rural areas,
to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to the National
Conference of Churches, the Muslim community, because this does have a
significant moral dimension—how we make the American
community safer and how we go about it. Today we meet with you. Later I
meet with some industry representatives as well as the NRA, and
executive director of the Defense Small Arms Advisory Council,
importers, etc.
"So the point I am
trying to make to you is we realize this requires all the stakeholders
to give us their best ideas to what is, as I said at the outset, a
complicated problem. There is no single answer. I go
back,like a lot of you, having been dealing with this issue since my
days as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and all the way back to the
1970s. If you at every one of the tragic events that have attracted so
much attention it’s hard to be able to pinpoint
what you should have done to assure that wouldn’t have happened. But
there’s also things we know. We know that there are certain actions we
take that have diminished the extent of the gun violence that otherwise
would be occurring in the United States.
"There is an emerging
set of recommendations not coming from me, but coming from the groups we
have met with. And I’m going to focus on the ones that relate primarily
to gun ownership, and the type of weapons we
own. And one is there is a surprising—so far—a surprising recurrence of
suggestions that we have universal background checks, not just close
the gun show loophole but totally universal background checks including
private sales. There has been a lot of discussion
from the groups we have met with so far, and I think the attorney
general has been in almost all the meetings will tell you, is how we
strengthen our background checks. What additional information should be
available, if any, and how do we get the information.
For example, convicted felons in a state—how do they get on the NICS,
that is the thing the gun dealer goes to check when you are a felon. It
doesn’t do a lot of good when in some states they have a backlog of
forty-, fifty-, sixty-thousand felons that they
never registered here. So we have got to talk about, there is a lot of
talk about how we entice, or what is the impediment keeping states from
relaying this information.
"There is also a good
deal of talk about gun safety, and what responsibility goes along with
gun ownership, which is something I would really like to talk to all of
you about. There has also been a surprise. Among
my colleagues, my former colleagues in the Senate, who have been pretty
universally opposed to any restrictions on gun ownership or what type
of weapons can be purchased etc., I have never quite heard as much talk
about the need to do something about high
capacity magazines as I have heard spontaneously from every group I
have met with so far.
"And the last area,
which is an area that has come up, has to do with the ability of any
agency to do any research on the issue of gun violence. For example,
we’re meeting before the week is out with the gaming
industry—I don’t mean gambling—with the video game industry. To use Pay
Moynihan’s expression, when we first started talking about the Biden
crime bill back in the ‘80s, he used the example of, he said ‘We’ve been
defining deviancy down.’ He used the example
of the assassination of a mob boss in 1936… making the front page of
every paper in America. And then he stood on the Senate floor and he
held up the New York Times and on page 54, he picked it up, at the very
back of the paper, where an entire family,including
grandmother, mother, father, children, were basically assassinated in
their apartment, thinking it may have been about a drug deal, and it
made page 54. And he said, ‘We’ve defined deviancy down.’
"Well one of the
things that we’ve been prohibited from doing beginning in the early part
of this century in 2004 is even the Center for Disease Control
gathering up information about the kinds of injuries. What
are the injuries and what are the source of the injuries? … I was
around in the 70s, the only guy who may remember this, I hope I don’t
insult him, is Ray LaHood, because he knows about the automobile
industry as well as the wholequestion of traffic safety
and highway safety. There was a big fight when Ifirst got to the Senate
that had begun in the late 60s and early 70s, where the automobile
industry was very reluctant to allow the Department of Transportation to
acquire statistics on the type of accidents
that occurred. They were not able to literally acquire the information,
because the concern was it would lead to calls for some rational
regulation, from guardrails toautomobiles. And I remember, Ray you may
remember, that when we finally broke through and
NITSA started keeping this information, we find out, if my memory is
correct that the vast majority of drivers operating an automobile, and
killed in an automobile accident, was because the steering wheel
actually broke their solar plexus, damaged their heart
or penetrated their upper body cavity. The reason why the industry
didn’t want everybody knowing that, at least my supposition was, it
became logical: Do something about steering wheels, so they can
collapse. Make sure that front end collisions had the ability
to absorbshock. And what does it lead to? It lead to, all of a sudden,
we said to automobile manufacturers you cannot make an automobile that
doesn’t have a steering column with the following attributes. You have
to make an automobile that can absorb x amount
of shock. All of a sudden when we found out passengers were being
killed because they were being thrown through windshields, or, if my
memory serves me, skull fractures from being thrown into the crossbar,
all of a sudden we started talking about, it made
sense, why don’t we have airbags? They didn’t want to have airbags.
Well guess what, you have airbags. We are saving lives.
"So there was a real
effort to deny the government just gathering the information. Well as
you know there are restrictions now on any agency in the government just
gathering the information about what kind of weapons
are used most to kill people. How many weapons used are trafficked
weapons? Are weapons used in gang warfare in our major cities—are they
legally purchased or are they purchased through strawmen? We don’t have
that information. And the irony is we are prohibited
under laws and appropriations bills from acquiring it.
"So I want to talk to
you a little bit about—as an owner of shotguns, as a guy, I’m no great
hunter, it’s mostly skeet shooting for me—I don’t quite understand why
everybody would be afraid of whether or not we
determine what is happening. So there is a whole lot of things that I
want to talk to you about. But I did feel it wise to tell you what we
have done so far and what we are doing from here. We are going to be
meeting again. This afternoon we have meetings.
Tomorrow I have meetings, and I am trying to set up telephone
conferences with the manufactures. Because there has got to be some
common ground to not solve every problem but diminish the probability
that what we have seen in these mass shootings will occur,
and diminish the probability that our children are at risk in our
schools, and diminish the probability that weapons will be used and
firearms will be used in dealing with aberrant behavior that takes place
in our society.
"So that’s what this
is all about. There is no conclusion that I have reached, and my
colleagues and I are putting together a series of recommendations for
the president. I committed to him that I would have these
recommendations to him by Tuesday. It doesn’t mean that this will be
the end of the discussion, but the public wants us to act.
"I will conclude by
saying, in all my years involved in the issues, there is nothing that
has pricked the consciousness of the Americanpeople, there is nothing
that has gone to the heart of the matter more than
the image people have of little six year old kids riddled, not shot,
but riddled, riddled, with bullet holes in their classroom. …I’m not
sure we can guarantee this will never happen again, but as the President
said even if we can onlysave one life it would
make sense. And I think we can do a great a great deal without in any
way imposing on and impinging on the rights of the Second Amendment.
That’s what this is about. And I thank you all for being here.
[He was asked by a reporter what he will talk about with the NRA later today.]
"Well we are going to talk about all the things I talked about here."
