Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Stephen Barton, a survivor of the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., on Tuesday at a White House event on gun control.Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. resumed the White House’s campaign for gun control on Tuesday by reporting on executive action taken unilaterally by the Obama administration and pressing Congress to take up the legislation again.
“We have not given up,†Mr. Biden said at an event at the White House. He said the administration had completed or made progress on 21 of 23 promisedactions that it could take without Congressional approval and he argued that lawmakers would eventually come around, too.
“We need Congress to act,†he said. “The American people are demanding it.†He warned the senators who blocked legislation that would expand background checks that the political winds had shifted in the six months since the school shootings in Newtown, Conn. “The country has changed. You will pay a price, a political price, for not getting engaged.â€
Mr. Biden, who appeared with a survivor of the movie theater shootings in Aurora, Colo., said the administration had moved to incorporate information from 17 states into the national background check database that had been missing, and worked to ensure that Medicaid would treat mental health care as it does physical health care. He also said the administration was releasing guidelines for how schools could better protect their children from an attack like the one in Newtown.
“Each of these measures I out! lined today would reduce gun violence,†Mr. Biden said.
