Washington (CNN) Joe Biden twice on Saturday said he met with students who survived the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, when he was vice president. But the Parkland shooting took place in February 2018, a little more than a year after Biden left office.

The Democratic presidential hopeful -- who is far from the only politician to misspeak but has acknowledged he is a "gaffe machine" -- has a reputation for making misstatements on the campaign trail. His latest campaign gaffes came at a gun control forum in Des Moines, Iowa, when he described meeting survivors of the shooting that left 17 dead when they visited Washington to lobby for stricter gun laws.

"I met with them and then they went off up on the Hill when I was vice president," Biden said at the forum. The former vice president made the same error later that day when he told reporters, "Those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president," while describing members of Congress ducking meetings with the students.

Biden did meet with a group of Parkland survivors in 2018, but he did so after he left office. Another mass shooting -- in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut -- took place while Biden served as vice president.

A spokeswoman for Biden, Kate Bedingfield, on Sunday tweeted a link to a story about Biden meeting with the Parkland students in 2018, writing: "Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who consoles Americans in their time of need so often that he sometimes mistakes the timing? But even more so, wouldn't it be nice to have a president who will actually fight to prevent these tragedies?"