Vice President Joe Biden will meet with Mayor Bloomberg and families from Newtown, Conn., Thursday to talk about the need for new federal gun laws as advocates slam Senate Democrats’ decision to drop an assault weapons ban from the gun-control package it plans to consider next month.

The vice president, mayor and families of some of the 20 first-graders and six educators slain by a gunman wielding an assault-style weapon at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December plan to meet at City Hall to “press the case for a common sense federal gun law,” the mayor’s office said.

Biden and Bloomberg have met several times since the massacre at Newtown as the vice president sought to develop a cohesive set of gun control proposals to deliver to President Barack Obama, who created a task force to curb gun deaths in the aftermath of the shooting.

The legislative proposal Biden developed includes the assault weapons ban, universal federal background checks and limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines.

The assault weapon ban Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said would not be included in the gun-control package to be put before legislators because it lacked the votes to pass was not listed on the agenda for Thursday’s meeting.

Biden and Obama have walked a fine line on the assault weapons ban, widely considered the most politically challenging element of the gun-control proposals the administration is pushing. While fully embracing the ban as a matter of policy, the administration has avoided describing it as a must-have, wary of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Instead, they’ve argued that at the very least the ban deserves a vote, even if political considerations ultimately place its passage out of reach.

Gun-control advocates have insisted on the ban after Adam Lanza used an assault-style weapon to gun down 26 people in Sandy Hook Elementary School, galvanizing a national discussion about efforts to curb gun violence.

But staunch opposition from the National Rifle Association and other groups has underscored the political risks for lawmakers who support the measures, and Democrats are eager to pass whatever they can before Americans lose interest in the issue and the window to act closes.

It was that sentiment that led Reid, D-Nev., to drop the ban from the bill the Senate plans to debate in April. But Biden insisted that the ban’s failure is not a foregone conclusion. He pointed to the original, 10-year assault weapons ban that Congress passed in 1994, noting that it too had been written off long before it eventually was adopted.

“I don’t see this as there’s an automatic endpoint, that, OK, there’s one vote, this is it, fails, now we move on,” Biden said. “We are going to continue to push for logical gun-safety regulations.”

Still, Biden acknowledged that if Congress expanded background checks but failed to adopt the assault weapons ban, the White House would not consider the broader effort a failure.

“That would be gigantic,” Biden said.

The fate of expanded background checks is also uncertain, with the NRA arguing that they could open the door to a national gun registry. Biden said the notion of registering guns crosses a cultural line, noting that unlike cars, which must be registered, guns are explicitly protected by the Constitution.

“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,” Biden said, using a term referring to conspiracy theorists, “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.”

In the Republican-run House, GOP leaders have said they’ll wait for the Senate to act before considering legislation. But they’ve not expressed support for an assault weapons ban and have shown little enthusiasm for most of Obama’s proposals.

(AP)