Photograph by George Frey/Bloomberg
A man holds a semi-automatic assault rifle for sale at the Rocky Mountain Gun Show in Sandy, Utah.
Vice President Joe Biden, who has suggested that anyone interested in assault weapons for home protection should go buy a shotgun instead, also sees no value in mega-clips for hunters.
“If you can’t get the deer in three shots, you shouldn’t be hunting,” Biden says. “You are an embarrassment.”
Biden, in an interview airing on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” holds out hope that public pressure will prevail as Congress demonstrates diminishing resolve for any sort of new gun regulation in the aftermath of the Newtown schoolhouse killings.
Addressing the Senate leadership’s rejection of a vote on an assault weapons ban, Biden says: “y experience, having been the only guy that did this once before, along with Dianne Feinstein and others, is that this doesn’t necessarily happen in one fell swoop.”
“”We are going to continue to push for logical, gun safety regulations,” Biden tells NPR. “Eventually the will of the people is going to prevail and we’re going to keep at it.”
On the proposal for universal background checks for gun-buyers, facing daunting odds in the House, he says: “When the Brady legislation passed back in ’94…the NRA and a significant portion of the opposition were absolutely opposed to it.”
On the checks: “Two million felons have tried to buy a gun and, because of the background check, have been denied. And even with that there is probably a 40 percent loophole that exists in the law.”
On high-capacity ammunition magazines: “It in no way violates anyone’s constitutional right. What is the downside of saying, you can have clips with only 10 rounds in it? What does that violate? Hunting? Sportsmanship? If you need more than 10 rounds to hunt, and some argue they hunt with that many rounds, you shouldn’t be hunting. If you can’t get the deer in three shots, you shouldn’t be hunting. You are an embarrassment.”
On the gun lobby’s fear of gun registration: “You don’t need to register guns to have logical gun safety laws. This is not – there is a healthy gun culture in this country with regard to hunters. They husband their guns and their weapons. They lock them up, they use them responsibly, they pass them down to their children, like my dad. This is about keeping guns out of the hands of people who, constitutionally, the government is able to prohibit from owning those guns.”
