Joe Biden: "I'm the guy that originally wrote the assault weapons ban"

Senator Joe Biden, the presumptive democratic vice-presidential nominee, from the CNN / YouTube debate (Biden's response starts at about the minute mark):



From Congressional Quarterly, on Senator Obama's VP pick:

One of the more surprising twists in the debut of Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s running mate has been the Democrats’ decision to highlight Biden’s work on the 1994 crime bill.
...
In addition to the funding for President Bill Clinton’s 100,000 cops initiative, the bill also included a ban on certain kinds of assault weapons. That provision almost sank the whole package in the House, when anti-gun control Democrats teamed up with Republicans to block the final bill from coming to the House floor. As ever-colorful Democratic Rep. Charlie Wilson of Texas put it, asking a lawmaker from an area like his East Texas district to vote for a gun ban was “like asking someone from Brooklyn to vote against Israel.”

But Biden didn’t want to compromise at all. The solution wasn’t to change the crime bill, he said at the time, but to “change eight votes in the House.” Clinton administration officials disagreed, and the negotiators made minor changes that picked off just enough moderate Republicans to allow the bill to pass, mostly by cutting spending on crime prevention programs. The assault weapons ban, however, stayed in the bill with only minor changes.

Article here. Senator Obama and Biden look like they're two peas in the gun control pod.