President Joe Biden called the shooting at a Nashville school that killed six people, including three children, “heartbreaking, a family’s worst nightmare.”
The president, who was speaking at Small Business Administration’s Women’s Business Summit Monday, said more needs to be done to stop gun violence.
“It’s ripping our communities apart,” he said.
The shooting took place at the Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school in Nashville that teaches preschool through 6th grade, Nashville police said.
Officials said the shooter was armed with at least two “assault-type” rifles and a handgun.
Biden called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban, saying we “need to do more to protect our schools.”
“It’s about time we began to make some more progress,” he said.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, a Democrat, echoed the president’s remarks, saying he strongly supports “bills to ban assault weapons from civilian use and to close gaps in our background check system.”
He urged lawmakers to come up with a bipartisan solution, but that is extremely unlikely this Congress with a slim Democratic majority in the Senate and a GOP-led House.
Last year the Senate passed the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act,” the first major piece of legislation to address gun violence since 1994. The legislation fell short of what some Democrats had hoped for, including their long hope of banning assault weapons.
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CNN’s Nicky Robertson contributed reporting to this post.
