Biden takes action; cites US ‘blemish’
WASHINGTON — 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.”
“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 during remarks at the White House.
He announced he is tightening regulations for buyers of
“ghost guns” — homemade firearms that usually are assembled from parts and often lack serial numbers used to trace them. Also, a proposed rule, expected within 60 days, will tighten regulations on pistol-stabilizing braces like the one used last month in Boulder, Colorado, in a shooting that left 10 dead.
On Thursday, family members whose children were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 and the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 attended the announcement. Biden thanked them for attend
ing, saying he understood it would remind them of the awful days when they got the calls.
He assured them, “We’re absolutely determined to make change.”
Biden’s announcement Thursday delivers on a pledge the president made last month to take what he termed immediate “common-sense steps” to address gun violence, after a series of mass shootings drew renewed attention to the issue.
His announcement came the day after five people were fatally shot at a home in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and hours before one person was killed and five people were wounded in the wake of a shooting at a cabinet-making business in Bryan, Texas. The suspected shooter is in custody.
Biden emphasized the scope of the problem: Between the mass killings in Atlanta spa businesses and the Colorado grocery store shooting last month, there were more than 850 additional shootings that killed 250 and injured 500 in the U.S., he said.
But Thursday’s announcement underscores 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 agenda he laid out on the campaign trail.
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,” he said.
While Biden asserted that he’s “willing to work with anyone to get it done,” gun control measures face slim prospects in a divided Senate, where Republicans remain near-unified against most proposals.
Biden was joined at the 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.”
It is legal to build a “ghost 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 that the parts be made with serial numbers and that buyers receive background checks.
Months before Biden was elected, the federal government had been 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.
Another change announced Thursday concerns a proposed rule that will designate pistols used with stabilizing braces as short-barreled rifles, which require a federal license to own and are subject to a more thorough application process and a $200 tax.
The department also is publishing model legislation within 60 days that is intended to make it easier for states to adopt their own “red flag” laws. Such laws allow for individuals to petition a court to allow the police to confiscate weapons from a person deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.
Biden is also nominating David Chipman, a former federal agent and adviser at the gun control group Giffords, to be director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Before retiring in 2012, Chipman spent 25 years as an agent at the ATF, where he served on the agency’s SWAT team and was among the team involved in investigating the Oklahoma City bombing and the first World Trade Center bombing.