Exclusive: What Joe Biden Told FRONTLINE About School Shootings and Gun Control in 2014
Update: Following additional mass shootings in the wake of Uvalde, President Joe Biden on June 2, 2002, called for Congress to take concrete steps to address gun violence, including banning assault weapons or raising the legal purchase age, expanding background checks and repealing “the liability shield that often protects gun manufacturers from being sued for the death and destruction caused by their weapons.”
In the wake of the May 24, 2022, school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, President Joe Biden urged the nation to stand up to the gun lobby and pled for action to stop the ongoing horror of mass shootings.
“As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” he said in emotional remarks from the White House. “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
The president cited his history trying to pass “common sense gun laws,” which he talked about in an interview with FRONTLINE back when he was vice president and was confronted with the Sandy Hook mass school shooting.
The interview was part of FRONTLINE’s reporting on America’s gun debate, and excerpts were featured in the 2015 film Gunned Down and the 2020 film NRA Under Fire, both from the veteran filmmaker Michael Kirk and his documentary group. In the wake of the Uvalde shooting, FRONTLINE is publishing the extended interview for the first time, offering fresh context for Biden’s struggles on the issue.
Read and watch: Biden’s extended 2014 interview, with transcript
In the November 2014 interview with producer and reporter Jim Gilmore, Biden took FRONTLINE back to the days immediately after the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
“There were things I wouldn’t even say here on television, how gruesome what happened was to these little first-grade kids,” Biden said. “And it just shocked the conscience of the country.”
Biden described to FRONTLINE what it was like when President Barack Obama, feeling “anger, sorrow and overwhelming frustration,” came to him after the Sandy Hook shooting: “It was like: ‘Enough is enough is enough. Put together something for me, Joe.’”
Watch: 2015’s Gunned Down
As legislators crafted a bipartisan bill to expand federal background checks, Biden was optimistic: “Over 91% of the American people supported expanding background checks,” he said in the interview. “Ninety percent of all the households in which there was a gun supported it. Eighty percent of the households that had an NRA member supported it.”
But as the films detailed, the legislation, known as the Manchin-Toomey bill, was defeated amid pushback by the NRA and other gun-rights groups. Biden described to FRONTLINE what it was like being in the Senate chamber with families of the Sandy Hook victims as the bill earned 54 votes, 6 short of the supermajority — 60 — needed to pass.
“They felt betrayed. That was the word I most often heard. … ‘Joe, how could they vote that way? Don’t they understand what happened? How can they do that? How can this be?’ I mean, it was disbelief and a sense of betrayal.”
Watch: 2020’s NRA Under Fire
As he did on Tuesday from the White House, then-Vice President Biden called for “common sense” gun laws and cited his work on earlier gun control legislation, including the assault weapons ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004.
At the time of the interview, Biden insisted that “we will prevail on this.” But following the Uvalde shooting, Biden acknowledged the country’s continued failure to act.
Watch: 2020’s Targeting El Paso, on an earlier, deadly mass shooting in Texas
“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” he asked. “Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it and stand up to the lobbies? It’s time to turn this pain into action.”
Read: 9 Documentaries That Provide Context on the Buffalo Shooting
