WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will travel to Buffalo, New York, on Tuesday to meet with the families of victims from Saturday’s shooting rampage and address the racism and hate that officials say motivated the gunman.
Biden, who will be joined by first lady Jill Biden, will visit a memorial at the Tops supermarket honoring those who died in the shooting. The gunman killed 10 people and wounded three others.
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The president and first lady will then meet with victims’ families as well as law enforcement, first responders and community leaders, yet another instance in which he’ll have to console people who lost loved ones in a mass shooting.
Speaking at a local community center afterward, Biden will “call this despicable act for what it is: terrorism motivated by a hateful and perverse ideology that tears at the soul of our nation,” a White House official said.
“He’ll call on all Americans to give hate no safe harbor, and to reject the lies of racial animus that radicalize, divide us, and led to the act of racist violence we saw on Saturday that took the lives of 10 of our countrymen,” the official added.
Biden will press Congress to take legislative action “to keep weapons of war off our streets” and to cut off access to firearms for criminals and people with serious mental illnesses.
“The president will call on Americans to seek a more perfect union that embraces the diversity that has made us the strongest and most dynamic nation in the history of the world,” the official said.
Biden has already had to deal with numerous mass shootings since he became president, an issue that has prompted him to take executive actions and call on Congress to pass legislation aimed at reducing gun violence.
House Democrats plan to vote this week on a bill that seeks to combat white supremacists and other domestic extremist groups, although Democratic efforts to advance gun control measures have been blocked by Republicans in the evenly divided Senate.
Some Republicans have come under fire for allegedly pushing the far-right conspiracy theory that investigators say the gunman in Buffalo wrote about in a lengthy “manifesto” and drove him to target and kill Black people. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., accused House GOP leadership Monday of “enabling” white supremacy and antisemitism.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
