President moves to curb ‘epidemic’ of gun violence
President Joe Biden, in his first gun-control measures since taking office, announced a half-dozen executive actions Thursday aimed at addressing a proliferation of gun violence across the nation that he called an “epidemic and an international embarrassment.”
Hours later, the latest mass shooting in the U.S., this one in Texas, left one person dead and five others wounded.
“The idea that we have so many people dying every single day from gun violence in America is a blemish on our character as a nation,” Biden said in remarks at the White House.
Family members whose children were killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut in 2012 and the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Flor
ida in 2018 were in attendance, and Biden thanked them for coming, saying he understood it would remind them of the tragedies.
But he assured them: “We’re absolutely determined to make change.”
Biden’s Thursday announcement delivers on a pledge the president made last month to take what he termed immediate “commonsense steps” to address gun violence after a series of mass shootings drew renewed attention to the issue.
His announcement came the same day as yet another, in South Carolina, left five people dead. And just hours after Biden spoke Thursday, one person was killed and five were wounded at a cabinetmaking business in Bryan, Texas, and a state trooper was shot during the manhunt that resulted in the suspected gunman being taken into custody.
Bryan Police Chief Eric Buske told reporters he believed the shooting suspect was an employee at the Kent Moore Cabinets location where the shooting happened.
Biden emphasized the scope of the problem: Between the mass killings in Atlanta massage businesses and the Colorado grocery store shooting last month, there were more than 850 additional shootings that killed 250 people and injured 500 in the U.S., he said.
But Thursday’s announcement underscored the limitations of Biden’s executive power to act on guns. His orders tighten regulations on homemade guns and provide more resources for gun violence prevention but fall far short of the sweeping guncontrol agenda he laid out on the campaign trail.
Indeed, Biden again urged Congress to act, calling on the Senate to take up House-passed measures closing background check loopholes. He also said Congress should pass the Violence Against Women Act, eliminate legal exemptions for gun manufacturers and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
“This is not a partisan issue among the American people,” Biden insisted.
While Biden asserted that he’s “willing to work with anyone to get it done,” gun-control measures face slim prospects in an evenly divided Senate, where Republicans remain nearly unified against most proposals.
Biden was joined at Thursday’s event by Vice President Kamala Harris and Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland said he was “under no illusions about how hard it is to solve the problem of gun violence” and emphasized a need for a “collective effort to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and save lives.”
The Justice Department cannot solve the problem by itself, he said, but “there is work for the department to do, and we intend to do it.”
Biden is tightening regulations of buyers of “ghost guns” — homemade firearms that usually are assembled from parts and milled with a metal-cutting machine and often lack serial numbers used to trace them. It’s legal to build a gun in a home or a workshop and there is no federal requirement for a background check.
The Justice Department will issue a proposed rule requiring such gun kits be treated as firearms under the Gun Control Act, which would require the parts be made with serial numbers and buyers undergo background checks.
Months before Biden was elected, the federal government already was working on a proposed rule that would change the definition of a firearm to include lower receivers, the essential piece of a semiautomatic rifle, in an effort to combat the proliferation of ghost guns and to stave off losing court battles over the issue.