Vice President Joe Biden took the administration’s push for stricter gun laws to Connecticut on Thursday, delivering a forceful and often emotional appeal for stronger measures only miles from the elementary school where a gunman killed 26 people, including children.
“We have to speak for those 20 beautiful children who died 69 days ago, 12 miles from here,” Biden said. “There is a moral price to be paid for inaction.” He was joined by Gov. Dannel Malloy of Connecticut, who used the high-profile forum to propose a series of tough new gun laws aimed at closing provisions and banning the type of weapon that was used at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“Two months ago, our state became the center of a national debate after a tragedy we never imagined could happen here,” Malloy said. “We have changed. And I believe it is now time for our laws to do the same.”
Many of the local, state and federal officials who spoke at the forum at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury underscored their appeals for tougher gun laws with stories about personal loss, both at Newtown and in other places across the country.
Biden, who met privately with two families whose children were killed at Sandy Hook before speaking, seemed to struggle with his emotions as he recalled a tragedy in his own life: the loss of his wife and daughter. It was “not gunfire, but a truck” that took their lives, he said. Biden had just been elected to the Senate for the first time in 1972 when his wife, Neilia, and 1-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed ina car accident.
Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, who introduced Biden, also recalled his experiences with gun violence, first as a child living on the South Side of Chicago and later as the leader of that city’s public school system. Deadly violence was so common, he said, burial funds were created for families.
Malloy, seeking to seize the current focus on the issue, said he wanted the state Legislature to pass a bill that would require background checks for all gun purchases, ban large-capacitymagazines that hold more than 10 rounds, expand a ban on assault weapons, require guns to be stored more safely and toughen the enforcement of existing gun laws.
The state legislation he proposed is similar to what the Obama administration is seeking to enact nationally.
While recent polls suggest broad national support for universal background checks, the other issues have proved more politically charged across the country and in Connecticut.
Malloy framed the issue around some simple questions:
“Questions like, why is the gun used at Sandy Hook not classified as an ‘assault weapon’ under today’s law?” he said. “Why are background checks required when someone buys a gun in a store, but not when they buy it privately or at a gun show? Why is there no limit on the size of a magazine that can be used in a semiautomaticweapon?”
In January, Malloy convened a Sandy Hook Advisory Commission to make specific recommendations in the areas of school safety, mental health and gun violence.
The state’s General Assembly also convened a bipartisan task force to look at many of the same issues.
But Malloy said Thursday that to wait for their findings would “run a risk of letting this critical moment in history pass us by.”
Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/22/2013