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Biden: Gun control to wait for immigration

by Reid J. Epstein

Gun control will now have to wait for immigration reform, Vice President Joe Biden told religious leaders Monday. Biden told a meeting of about 20 representatives from faith-based organizations that the White House push on gun control won't happen until after the Senate completes an immigration reform package, people who attended the meeting said. Biden's comments, echo the sentiment from the major gun control groups and Senate aides working closely on the issue. But it marks the first time the White House has revealed such a timeline.

"He doesn't think it will come back before they've made some pretty good steps on immigration," said Sister Marjorie Clark, a lobbyist for Network, the Catholic social justice organization. "He said, 'I don't think it will happen before immigration, but it will come back.'"

Aside from the timing, he provided fewer details to the religious leaders about the next steps than he did during a meeting Thursday with law enforcement officials. Then, people present told POLITICO, Biden said he planned extensive travel to states where senators voted against expanded background checks and spoke of tweaking the failed bill to win more votes.

Those present for the meeting included Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist Billy Graham and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Barrett Duke, the vice president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy arm.

"He basically just said in general that these stakeholder meetings that if you put words into the vice president's mouth it sometimes comes out wrong and gets misquoted"

Graham, two people in the meeting said, told Biden the government should consider taxing media companies that broadcast violent images and produce violent video games.

"He floated ideas like the idea that violence should be taxed so that those proceeds would go to help victims and their families," said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly.

Biden told Graham that there was "no restriction on the ability to do that, there's no legal reason why they couldn't" tax violent images, Clark added.

Graham's representatives did not respond to requests for comment. Biden's office also did not respond to requests to comment about the meeting. 

Biden thanked the religious leaders for their work on gun control since the White House began pushing for it after the December massacre at Newtown, Conn. He again spoke of how senators who voted for the bill have since seen their approval ratings rise, while those who opposed it have seen their numbers drop. But he did not tick through specific senators' polling data as he did last week, said Michael McBride, a lead organizer at the PICO Network, an alliance of faith-based organizations.

"We are energized," said Vincent DeMarco, the Baltimore-based national coordinator of Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence. "One way to look at it is we all came out of that room energized in January and helped convince 19 senators and now we got to convince five more."

Five people who attended the 2½-hour meeting told POLITICO that Biden made a specific plea to those present not to keep his words off the record from reporters.

"He basically just said in general that these stakeholder meetings that if you put words into the vice president's mouth it sometimes comes out wrong and gets misquoted," said Shantha Alonso, the director of the poverty program at the National Council of Churches.

"He said it was off the record," Clark said.  "What he did say was that he had had a meeting with another group and at some point in the past and he doesn't like being misquoted and he felt that stuff was said that wasn't accurate and he trusted that that wouldn't happen again."

Read more about: Joe Biden, Immigration, Gun Control