Biden Will Urge Lawmakers to Pass Gun Laws in Address on Mass Shootings

WASHINGTON — President Biden will urge lawmakers to pass new gun control measures during a speech from the White House on Thursday evening, his most direct appeal for action since massacres in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y., last month.

In a statement, the White House said the president would “deliver remarks on the recent tragic mass shootings and the need for Congress to act to pass common sense laws to combat the epidemic of gun violence that is taking lives every day.”

Mr. Biden will speak at 7:30 p.m. from the Cross Hall, a ceremonial part of the White House residence often used by presidents to deliver major speeches.

White House officials have not revealed what Mr. Biden will call for in his remarks. He has said in the past that he favors reinstating the ban on assault weapons that was in place for a decade before expiring in 2004. He has also called on lawmakers in the past to pass universal background checks.

Both of those measures are seen as highly unlikely to pass in Congress, where fierce Republican opposition has historically stood in the way of their enactment. Lawmakers have said recently that they do not believe there is enough bipartisan support to pass either measure.

But in the last few days, a small, bipartisan group of senators has been discussing whether it can reach consensus on a narrower set of policies, potentially including a modest expansion of background checks, legal changes to prevent the mentally ill and teenagers from getting guns and new rules for gun trafficking.

Mr. Biden’s planned speech comes nine days after an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Just 10 days before that, ten Black people were killed at a supermarket in Buffalo. In both cases, the shooter used a military-style weapon.

Within hours of the Texas shooting, Mr. Biden expressed horror and outrage, describing the pain of losing a child as “having a piece of your soul ripped away.” At the time, he did not call for specific actions by Congress, but he lamented the decade of inaction since 20 children were killed in a similar shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

“As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Mr. Biden said. “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

Vice President Kamala Harris went further last weekend, telling reporters that Congress should pass a ban on assault weapons.

“We know what works on this,” she said. “It includes: Let’s have an assault weapons ban. You know what an assault weapon is? You know how an assault weapon was designed? It was designed for a specific purpose: to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war with no place, no place in a civil society.”