In this episode, as the title suggests, the White House is Five Votes Down on a bill they are trying to get past the House. The bill, which they spend the episode trying to get the votes for, is one which would restrict the sale of automatic firearms. The issue of guns comes up often throughout the series, with many debates on how to deal with the issue and plot lines having to do with guns and shootings.

President Biden has in the past few days called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban so that he can sign it into law. Two bills were introduced by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Chris Murphy, one which would ban assault weapon sales, and another which would raise the age to 21 for buying an assault weapon. President Biden, like President Bartlet, doesn’t have enough votes to get the bills passed, given that democrats don’t have the 60 votes in the Senate needed to bring the floor to a vote, and even if they did, the bill would never get to the Senate because it’s a Republican House.

The reason that President Biden chose to call for the ban, and the Senators introduced the bills, is due, unfortunately, to the fact that in the past week, 5 shootings have happened. The bills are not ones that would strip away rights to guns, but rather take baby steps to make sure that safer guns are in safer hands. Whenever shootings like this happen, politicians, especially those on the left side of the aisle, push for gun control measures. Shootings in America are much more common than they are in other countries of similar socio-economic levels. This, many experts say, is indeed due to the fact that America has a much more open gun policy than other countries do.

However, the issue is a very divisive one, with the Second Amendment only adding fuel to the fire. It is also difficult for politicians to make decisions on how to vote on gun issues because of the powerful NRA, which heavily lobbies members of Congress, and works hard to get their candidates in office. In the episode, a Congressman who doesn’t want to vote for the bill points out this difficulty, saying “The NRA makes me a target in the next election, I lose”. The fact that the country is so polarized over the issue makes it very hard for the debate to not be taken over by politics. In the episode, Josh expresses his frustration over this fact, saying “You know, I realize as an adult not everyone shares my view of the world. And with an issue as hot as gun control I'm prepared to accept a lot of different points of view as being perfectly valid. But we can all get together on the grenade launcher, right?”

Gun violence is an obvious problem in America, and often an insurmountable one, given the wall of controversy it is behind. To solve the problem, we need to balance the rights and traditions of Americans with the universal right to life. The decisions on the issue will continue to be complex and difficult so long as the country continues to be so divided.