The president of the United States, Joe Biden, promised this Tuesday that he will meet with members of Congress to discuss the issue of gun controlafter the shooting at a school in Uvalde (Texas) that left 19 children and two teachers dead, in addition to the attacker.
(You might be interested in: Texas: Uvalde begins to bury victims of the Robb school shooting)
“I will meet with Congress on the gun issue, I promise,” Biden said at the start of his White House meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who is visiting Washington.
(You might be interested in: Analysis: The school massacres, an endless drama in the United States)
Biden thus responded to questions from journalists about whether he plans to meet with
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to address the issue of
arms control in the country.
However, the president did not reveal when he plans to meet with the
legislators.
The debate on firearms control was reactivated last week in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, in which an 18-year-old boy, identified as Salvador Ramos, entered a primary school armed with an automatic rifle that he had purchased legally and he fired indiscriminately at the students.
Several Democratic Party politicians and civil society activists have tried to advocate for gun control to prevent more school shootings across the country, while
that Republicans, historically opposed to measures that limit the purchase of
firearms, have preferred to focus the debate on the attacker’s mental health problems.
Ramos had no history of mental health problems prior to the shooting, according to authorities.
The Uvalde shooting is the deadliest school shooting in the United States since
of Sandy Hook, in which 27 people were killed, including the attacker, in December
from 2012.
Biden asks New Zealand for advice on violence
In addition, President Biden asked New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for advice on how to address violence and extremism.following the recent racially motivated shooting at a New York state supermarket and the massacre at a Texas college.
“We need your advice” on issues such as violence, internet extremism and the climate crisis, Biden said at the start of a meeting with the New Zealand prime minister in the Oval Office.
The president referenced the March 2019 white supremacist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, where Australian-born Brenton Harrison Tarrant shot 51 Muslims to death.
Following the massacres, Ardern launched an international crusade against hate speech and reform to ban military-style assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons.
At the meeting in the White House, Biden said that “there is a lot of suffering” in the United States after the massacres in New York and Texaswhile the New Zealand prime minister expressed her “sincere condolences” and offered her support in “anything that may be of value”.
The US president and the New Zealand prime minister also discussed challenges such as the climate crisis, trade relations in the Pacific and the war unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“The conversation was very warm and there was a great understanding. They talked about the shared vision for the Indo-Pacific and especially the importance of intensifying the relationship with the Pacific island nations,” said a senior administration official in a call with journalists.
The relationship with the Pacific islands is one of the great foreign policy priorities for the Biden Administration in order to counter the rise of China in the region.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from Eph.
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