President Joe Biden said he’d hoped, when he became president, that he wouldn’t “have to do this again.”
Nearly 10 years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in which a shooter killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, Biden delivered remarks on Tuesday in the aftermath of a Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that marked the deadliest school shooting in the decade since.
But his seven-minute address to the nation perhaps revealed the distance between the present moment and a decade ago, when his former boss President Barack Obama famously shed tears in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting.
The notable difference: Both the president and the former president in their statements Tuesday not only expressed the grief of a nation but – unlike a decade ago – they were not shy in assessing blame.
Biden evoked the heartache of a parent, drawing from his own experience of having suddenly lost loved ones when his wife and 13-month-old daughter were killed in an automobile accident in 1972.
The president – like the rest of America, caught blindsided by the shooting – had few specifics to offer, having spent recent days on an overseas trip weighing international issues like the U.S. response to potential Chinese aggression against Taiwan.
Still, after just last week visiting the families of the victims of a racist mass killing in Buffalo, he took a decidedly tougher tone on gun control, demanding that the nation “stand up to the gun lobby” and “do what we all know in our gut needs to be done.”
Describing the 10 years since Obama addressed the nation over the Sandy Hook shooting, Biden recalled the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, as well as some 900 incidents of shootings at schools, saying “the list goes on and on.”