Game makers meet with VP
WASHINGTON — Looking for broader remedies to gun violence, Vice President Joe Biden is reaching out to the video game industry for ideas as the White House seeks to assemble proposals in response to last month’s massacre at a Connecticut elementary school.
Biden is scheduled to meet with video game representatives today as the White House explores cultural factors that may contribute to violent behavior.
The vice president, who is leading a task force that will present recommendations to President Barack Obama on Tuesday, met with other representatives from the entertainment industry, including Comcast and the Motion Picture Association of America, on Thursday.
Friday’s meeting comes a day after the National Rifle Association rejected Obama administration proposals to limit high-capacity ammunition magazines and dug in on its opposition to an assault weapons ban, which Obama has previously said he will propose to Congress. The NRA was one of the pro-gun rights groups that met with Biden during the day.
In previewing the meeting with the video game industry, Biden recalled the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who lamented during crime bill negotiations in the 1980s that the country was “defining deviancy down.” It’s unclear what, if anything, the administration is prepared to recommend on how to address the depiction of violence in the media.
White House press secretary Jay Carney last month suggested that not all measures require government intervention.
On gun control, however, the Obama administration is assembling proposals to curb gun violence that would include a ban on sales of assault weapons, limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines and universal background checks for gun buyers.
“The vice president made it clear, made it explicitly clear, that the president had already made up his mind on those issues,” NRA president David Keene said after the meeting. “We made it clear that we disagree with them.”
Obama has pushed reducing gun violence to the top of his domestic agenda following last month’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman slaughtered 20 children and six adults before killing himself.
“I committed to him I’d have these recommendations to him by Tuesday,” Biden said Thursday, during a separate White House meeting with sportsmen and wildlife groups.
The vice president later met privately with the NRA and other gun-owner groups for more than 90 minutes.
