Joe Biden will denounce in Buffalo on Tuesday the racism that has cost the lives of ten African-Americans, and ask Congress to regulate more firearms, knowing that this call, repeated many times, is once again likely to remain vain.
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The American president left the White House on Tuesday for a trip of a few hours to this city in the far north of New York State.
Joe Biden, whom his character and a painful family history naturally lead to empathy, wants to “share (the) mourning” of families and “bring comfort”, said his spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday.
Accompanied by his wife Jill Biden, the 79-year-old Democrat will meet with survivors and then deliver a speech pointing to the massacre “for what it is: terrorism driven by a hateful and evil ideology, an ideology that tears at the soul of our country,” according to a White House official.
“He will call on Americans to leave no shelter for hatred and to reject the lies of racial animosity that radicalize, divide us and lead to the act of racist violence that we have seen,” the official continued.
The country of 330 million people is plagued by racial hatred and the daily scourge of gun violence. It also suffers from cultural divisions, which transform the slightest meeting of parents of students into a battlefield, and ideological, such as the question of abortion, which has just been reopened.
Fire arms
Joe Biden, knowing full well that his party does not have a sufficient majority there, still wants to call on Congress on Tuesday to “act so that weapons of war do not circulate in our streets” and so that “weapons fire do not end up in the hands of criminals or people with serious mental illnesses.”
The Democrat has long called for a ban on assault weapons – like the one used on Sunday. This is what New Zealand did, for example, after the racist massacre against Christchurch mosques in 2019, a massacre that would have inspired the alleged Buffalo murderer, Payton Gendron, 18.
Joe Biden would also like to make criminal and psychiatric background checks mandatory for people buying firearms.
But all his attempts have come up against a Republican opposition very attached to the constitutional right to bear arms, and the powerful lobby of the sector, the NRA.
The organization Gun Violence Archive has already counted more than 200 “mass shootings” this year, during which at least four people were injured or killed.
‘Motivated by hate’
Including, on Saturday, that perpetrated by a young white man, who, with his assault rifle, killed ten African-American people in a Buffalo supermarket, “a racist crime motivated by hate” according to the authorities.
Before the massacre, Payton Gendron published a racist manifesto of 180 pages, where he defines himself as “fascist”, “racist”, “anti-Semite” and claims the conspiracy theory of the “great replacement”.
Joe Biden often recalls that he had decided to run for the White House after seeing the ultra-right parading in August 2017 in Charlottesville (Virginia, south). A young woman was killed after a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove into a group of anti-racist protesters.
Since his election, he invokes the “soul” of an America which would be, in essence, united but lacks levers when it is necessary to take action.
The president appointed a government team representing all minorities and pushed to Supreme Court Ketanji Brown Jackson, the institution’s first black woman.
But he failed to pass federal legislation protecting access to the ballot box for minorities, threatened in the southern states at the hands of the Republicans.