After Recent Mass Shooting, Biden Call Congress to Address Gun Violence
Tuesday, one day after a deadly shooting rampage on the campus of a Michigan University left three people dead and five more injured, US President Joe Biden urged Congress to take action against America’s scourge of gun violence.
As the president of a country where shootings occur frequently, Biden claimed to have promised the Democratic governor of the state the “deployment of all necessary federal law enforcement.”
All of the casualties were students who were shot during the shooter’s rampage on the Michigan State University (MSU) campus. The shooter ultimately died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Anthony McRae, a 43-year-old suspect, was not connected to the school, according to police, who announced this at a tearful press conference in Lansing, the state’s capital in the north-central region.
Police revealed at a tearful press conference in Lansing, the state’s capital, that the 43-year-old suspect, Anthony McRae, had no connection to the school and had been discovered dead on Monday night at midnight.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer described the topic of gun violence as a “uniquely American problem” at the briefing, looking clearly concerned.
She described the university as having turned into “another place that is supposed to be about community and togetherness broken by gunshots and bloodshed” while speaking to reporters.
In two subsequent White House speeches, Biden hammered home the argument.
He declared that “too many American communities have been destroyed by gun violence.”
But we must do more, he said. “I have taken measures to battle this pandemic in America, including a historic number of executive actions and the first meaningful gun safety law in almost 30 years.”
The shooting took place the night before the anniversary of the Parkland, Florida, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, which claimed the lives of 14 students and three staff members.
Every American should “exclaim ‘enough’ and demand that Congress act,'” according to Biden, after the shooting.
Slow Development
Biden has unsuccessfully urged Congress to reinstate the 1994–2004 assault rifle ban that was in place, but he is meeting resistance from Republicans who are ardent upholders of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms and who have held a tenuous majority in the House of Representatives since January.
Numerous students were instructed to take shelter when bullets broke out in a college building where two students were slain early on Monday evening.
After killing another student at the students’ union, the shooter fled the scene, setting off a massive police operation that saw officers rush the 5,000-acre school.
After hastily posting security camera photographs of a Black man wearing a baggy blue jacket and red sneakers, police received a tip from a neighborhood citizen.
At a press conference on Tuesday, interim deputy chief Chris Rozman of the university police revealed that investigators “absolutely no notion what the purpose was.”
He claimed that officers had searched a home connected to the suspect and found a weapon.
In a nation where there are more firearms than people and where efforts to curtail their proliferation are consistently met with fierce resistance, gun violence is alarmingly prevalent.
Representative Elissa Slotkin stressed during a news conference that this was the second shooting on a school campus in the midwestern US state in 15 months, adding, “If this is not a wake-up call to do something, I don’t know what is.”
At Oxford High School in the small Michigan town of Oxford, a 15-year-old male student opened fire in November 2021, leaving four classmates dead and seven more injured.
Slotkin demanded action against gun violence, saying, “I am overwhelmed with wrath that we have to have another press conference to talk about our children being slaughtered in their classrooms.”
According to the university’s website, there are about 50,000 students enrolled at MSU, a prestigious school in the United States, with the majority of them being undergraduates.
In the United States, shootings result in tens of thousands of fatalities each year and many more injuries.
Last month, an elderly man opened fire in a dance hall in California where locals were celebrating the Lunar New Year, killing eleven people.
