Biden to speak on gun safety shortly after his son is found guilty on firearms charges
Originally Published: 11 JUN 24 12:09 ET
Updated: 11 JUN 24 12:41 ET
By Michael Williams, CNN
Washington (CNN) — President Joe Biden is set to address gun safety during a speech in Washington on Tuesday - hoping to contrast his administration’s efforts to promote gun control legislation with his opponent’s currying of the gun lobby’s favor.
The president will speak at Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund’s “Gun Sense University,” where he is expected to announce that the Justice Department has charged more than 500 defendants for violating new provisions created by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
While it’s an important topic for the president’s reelection run, the speech comes at an awkward moment politically and personally for the Biden family: The president’s son, Hunter Biden, was found guilty Tuesday morning of three felonies related to lying on federal forms that require gun purchasers to affirm they are not addicted to drugs while buying a handgun in 2018 when he was in the midst of a serious addiction to crack cocaine.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the timing of Biden’s address and his son’s federal trial Tuesday morning.
While Biden has largely avoided commenting on his son’s trial - he said in an interview last week that he would respect the trial’s outcome and would not pardon his son - the outcome of the jury’s verdict is sure to be at the top of his mind on Tuesday. The president is known to be passionately defensive of his family and sensitive to outside criticism of his son’s troubled history.
“As I said last week, I am the President, but I am also a Dad. Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today,” Biden said in a statement following the verdict. “So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery. As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”
The painful moment for the Biden family comes a day before President Biden is expected to leave for a three-day trip to Italy for the G7 summit. The fluke of scheduling speaks to the balance Biden has been forced to strike throughout his son’s legal proceedings. As the trial was underway last week, Biden was in France commemorating D-Day.
Aides said the president was keeping track of the trial from overseas, and remained in touch with his son and first lady Dr. Jill Biden, who had returned to Delaware to attend the trial for one day.
Before and after that trip, Biden spent a sizable amount of time with Hunter in Delaware. He returned from France directly to the family home in Wilmington.
Biden had not been previously scheduled to return to Delaware to see his son before leaving for Italy. But with a guilty verdict now in, it remained an open question of whether that plan could change.
He’ll attempt to put the personal drama on the back-burner while he talks about gun violence, a topic that he views as key to his political life.
As a senator, the president helped get an assault weapons ban passed through Congress in the 1990s and has promised to do so again. He also frequently touts signing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was the first significant gun safety legislation in a quarter-century when it was passed.
That act, which was signed into law by Biden almost two years ago, was created in the wake of massacres at a Texas elementary school and a New York supermarket. It established new criminal offenses for the straw-purchasing of firearms by buyers who lie about the gun’s intended owner, among other provisions.
Biden has pushed for universal background checks of gun purchases, increased red-flag laws that allow law enforcement to confiscate guns from those deemed a threat to safety, and a ban on assault weapons. He has said he would make those efforts a priority if he were to attain a second term.
But most of those policies would include congressional cooperation, and gun control remains one of the most divisive and intractable topics in American politics.
Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has promised to roll back any gun-control advancements made during Biden’s term. Addressing the NRA convention in May, Trump said the rights of gun owners were “under siege” and urged them to vote in November.
CNN’s Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
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