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President Biden on Monday aimed 9mm pistols, seemingly suggesting that “high-caliber weapons” should be banned.
The president made the statements outside the White House after returning from a visit to the site of a mass shooting in Texas where 21 people, including 19 elementary school children, were killed last week.
President Joe Biden speaks with members of the media on the south lawn of the White House in Washington on Monday, May 30, 2022, after returning from Wilmington, Del. (Photo by AP / Andrew Harnik)
Reporting on a visit to a New York trauma hospital, Biden said doctors showed him x-rays of gunshot wounds.
“They said a .22 caliber bullet would be lodged in the lung and we could probably get it out, maybe we could get it and save our lives. A 9mm bullet ejected the lung from the body,” Biden said.
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“So the idea of these high-caliber weapons is, eh, there’s just no rational basis for that in terms of self-protection, hunting,” Biden added. “Remember that the constitution was never absolute.”
“A cannon could not be bought when the Second Amendment was passed,” Biden said. “You couldn’t go out and buy a lot of weapons.”
The president, however, ruled out the possibility of issuing an executive order on weapons, saying, “I can’t dictate these things.”
UVALDE, TEXAS – MAY 26: A monument is seen around the Robb Elementary School poster after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 26, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas. 19 students and 2 adults were reportedly killed, and the gunman was shot dead by law enforcement. (Photo by Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
“I can do the things I’ve done and any executive action I can take, I’ll continue to take. But I can’t ban a weapon. I can’t change a background check. I can’t do that,” he said.
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Biden’s comments were in line with his tough stance on guns during the 2020 presidential campaign. In statements during a fundraising event in Seattle in November 2019, Biden said he supported the Second Amendment, but he called the absolutist arguments about gun rights “strange.”
“Why should we allow people to have military-style weapons, including pistols with 9mm bullets and that can hold 10 or more cartridges,” he said.
The 9mm round is the most popular handgun caliber in the United States, accounting for more than half of all pistols produced in 2019, according to Shooting Industry magazine. The data showed that during the 2010s, 9mm pistols accounted for more than 40% of all pistols produced in the United States, or about four out of ten pistols.
The children run to a safe place after escaping through a window during a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School where a gunman killed nineteen children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, USA on May 24, 2022. ( Pete Luna / Uvalde Leader-News / Handout via REUTERS)
The second amendment is back in the spotlight after a lone gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, 18, killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, about 85 miles west of San Antonio.
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The assault was the deadliest shooting at a U.S. elementary school since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, nearly a decade ago.