Block: Gun owners will say that all of these lines are arbitrary? Why 10 rounds? Why not seven?
Biden: Sure they are arbitrary. Why age 18 to vote? Because society has concluded that the capacity to keep yourself from doing damage and or allowing other to do damage – you don't let 9 year old drive – well that is arbitrary. There's some 9 year olds might be able to drive better then some 16 year olds. Limiting it to 10 rounds makes a difference in how many shots you can let off before someone can intervene.
Block: If you look at the numbers the vast majority of deaths in this country are not from assault weapons, they are from handguns. Are you really fixing the main problem?
Biden: No, you are not fixing the problem. That is like saying, does it make any sense to ban cigarette smoking while you still have global warming going on? C'mon. Does that fix the environmental problem? No. But it saves some people's lives. Do you say the fact that we took lead out of gasoline? Does that solve the problem? No. It doesn't. We still have too many emissions going into the air. But it helps. I find that a bizarre argument; if it doesn't solve the whole problem but, guess what? The fact is that it does impact. The people I go to, to look to, when we talk about assault weapons and magazines; talk to the police officers. They are tired of being outgunned. They are tired of being outgunned.
Block: Well when you say it does save people's lives there has to be some sort of calculus here, right? There has be to be some point where you say, is the number of lives that we save, does that outweigh the burdens and restrictions we put on millions of Americans. How do you draw that conclusion?
Biden: Tell me what the burden is that you have to buy three clips with 10 rounds versus one clip with 30. The cost is the same. What is the burden? What am I doing to infringe on your constitutional right? You can think of a thousand burdens we put on people that, in fact, are [INAUDIBLE] impact positively on society. It is one thing if you can tell me the burden is onerous. First of all, the vast majority of gun owners are not running around with clips that hold 30 rounds. There is no good data. Here's part of the problem. Part of the problem is when the authorization had to be renewed for much of this in 2004, restrictions were placed on the ability of the government even to keep data.
Block: What's the problem with having a gun registry? A national, mandatory gun registry? We license our cars, why shouldn't we have to license and register our guns?
Biden: Because there is a – this is where you start to cross a cultural line. The idea that you register your guns – it may make logical sense to say this, but there isn't a constitutional right to own an automobile. There is a Second Amendment constitutional right to own a weapon: The right to have and bear arms. When you go to registration, it raises all the black helicopter crowd notion that what this is all about is identifying who has a gun so that one day the government can get up and go to the house and arrest everyone who has a gun, and they'll cite Nazi Germany and all that.
You don't need to register guns to have logical gun safety laws. This is not - there is a healthy gun culture in this country with regard to hunters. They husband their guns and their weapons; they lock them up, they use them responsibly, they pass them down to their children, like my dad. This is about keeping guns out of the hands of people who, constitutionally, the government is able to prohibit from owning those guns.
Block: Mr. Vice President, thank you for your time.
Biden: Thank you.
