Biden to appear at national gun violence vigil

President Joe Biden will deliver remarks at the 10th annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence on Wednesday, just a week before the nation will mark a decade since the Sandy Hook school shooting, according to the White House.

Organized by Newtown Action Alliance Fund and partners, as well as 150 families, survivors, students and advocates will fly in for the vigil in Washington, D.C. this week. Members of Congress and their staff were also invited to attend the event, which will take place at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill.

Biden will be the first president to attend the vigil, which has taken place every year since 2013. Advocates told POLITICO they view the vigil as a chance for the president to honor the more than 1 million gun violence victims since Sandy Hook, as well as an opportunity for him to highlight his gun policy priorities for the next year.

Fred Guttenburg, a close Biden ally whose daughter Jaime was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018, described the decision to go as “Biden being Biden, showing up for those affected by the worst possible thing and trying to do what he can do to make it better.”

Biden has a lengthy record in the gun violence prevention community. He was the Obama administration’s point person on gun policy after the Sandy Hook shooting that left 20 first-graders and six educators dead. But none of the bills to expand background checks, ban certain assault rifles and limit the size of magazines cleared the 60 votes needed to beat back a Senate filibuster at the time.

The politics surrounding gun legislation have shifted since then, as evidenced by Biden’s gun policy accomplishments as president. Following the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde this year, Biden signed the first gun safety bill in nearly 30 years and saw through the bipartisan confirmation of the first director of the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms since 2013.

Biden has continued to trumpet the need for more reforms, including an assault weapons ban, in the wake of continued mass shootings. In November alone, a Walmart employee opened fire, killing six people in a break room. Five people were killed and 18 were injured in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs. And Charlottesville, Va., a former football player opened fire in a garage after a field trip, killing three students.