Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on June 15. | AP Photo Biden: Opposition to gun control 'borders on irrational'

Wednesday was a hard day for Vice President Joe Biden. He spent it, he said, reliving his grief.

Biden told parents of children slain in Newtown, Connecticut, and gun control activists about the agony of discussing the disease that killed his son, and he commiserated with them about the lack of federal progress to restrict the weapons that killed their sons and daughters three years ago.


“We’re, as it relates to rational gun policy, in the same place we were,” Biden said at a fundraiser for Sandy Hook Promise, a group that seeks to prevent gun violence founded by parents of two of the 20 slain children.

Biden spoke at Mellon Auditorium in Washington as Connecticut’s Democratic senators, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker continued their filibuster on Wednesday night. They’ve vowed to hold up a spending bill until the Senate considers universal background checks and a measure that would block people on a terrorism watch list from buying guns.

“This borders on irrational,” Biden said of resistance to those and other efforts to reduce gun violence, including an assault weapons ban and promoting so-called “smart guns” that can be fired only by an authorized user.

“We should not stop” pushing for new laws, Biden said, recalling that it took him seven years before winning passage of the first assault weapons ban in the mid-1990s.

That ban expired after 10 years, in 2004, under President George W. Bush.

“Had Al Gore won that [2000] election — I think he won it anyway,” joked Biden, who was speaking without a prepared text, before continuing, “Had Al Gore won that election, a lot would be different, we’d still have that [assault weapons ban] in place, and God knows how many lives would be changed.”

Biden grew close to the Sandy Hook families as he led a failed effort to pass universal background check legislation in 2013. He praised the parents’ courage as they lobbied members of Congress then, and work more recently to prevent gun violence by teaching kids to recognize the signs of someone who might become violent, and to head off social alienation by being kinder to one another.

“Every time you talk about it, you relive it as if you got that phone call five minutes ago,” said Biden, whose son Beau Biden died of brain cancer at age 49 last year. In 1972, he lost his first wife and their daughter in a car accident.

Biden, who spoke so quietly that he was barely audible despite complete silence among the several hundred people gathered, said he’d just come from thinking a lot about Beau.

Earlier in the afternoon, he’d met with Cabinet officials about his “Cancer Moon Shot” initiative.

“I had trouble getting through the meeting,” Biden said, “because every time we talk about specifics, I think of my Beau.”

Biden said he’d spoken off the cuff when, as he announced in the Rose Garden last year that he would not run for president, he said he would’ve liked to be the president who oversaw a cancer cure.

It was President Barack Obama, Biden said, who gave Biden authority to run the Moon Shot. If Obama had asked, Biden said, “I would’ve said no, I would’ve been a coward.”

Biden pledged to keep pushing for new gun restrictions even after he leaves office.

“I don’t know what the hell else to do, but I promise you I’m going be part of your ranks,” Biden said. “I’ll be involved to make sure that we eventually get this done.”