Biden targets law-breaking gun dealers in plan
He seeks crackdown on gun violence, illegal firearms
President Joe Biden announced new efforts Wednesday to stem a rising national tide of violent crime, declaring the federal government is “taking on the bad actors doing bad things to our communities.” But questions persist about how effective the efforts can be in what could be a turbulent summer.
Crime rates have risen after plummeting during the initial months of the coronavirus pandemic, creating economic hardship and anxiety. Biden’s plan focuses on providing money to cities that need more police, offering community support and most of all cracking down on gun violence and those supplying illegal firearms.
“These merchants of death are breaking the law for profit,” Biden said. “If you willfully sell a gun to someone who’s prohibited, my message to you is this: We’ll find you and we’ll seek your license to sell guns. We’ll make sure you can’t sell death and mayhem on our streets.”
But there are also tricky politics at play, and Biden’s plan shows how few options the Democratic president has on the issue.
The steps he outlined are aimed at going hard after gun dealers who break federal law and establishing strike forces in several cities to help stop weapons trafficking. He also said he would seek more money for the agency that tracks the nation’s guns.
But the rest of his new strategy boils down mostly to suggestions for beleaguered localities. He’s encouraging cities to invest some of their COVID -19 relief funds into policing and pushing alternative
crime reduction steps such as increased community support and summer jobs for teenagers — often both targets and perpetrators of violence. But it’s voluntary. The president has been clear that he is opposed to the “defund the police” movement, which has been effectively used against other Democrats to cast them as anti-law enforcement.
“This is not a time to turn our backs on law enforcement,” said Biden, who noted that “crime historically rises during the summer, and as we emerge from this pandemic the traditional summer spike may be even more pronounced than it usually
would be.”
But he’s also is trying to boost progressives’ efforts to reform policing, following a year of demonstrations and public anguish sparked by the killing by police of George Floyd and other Black people across the country. While combating crime and overhauling the police don’t have to be at odds, the two efforts are increasingly billed that way.
Biden will try to do both at once. But Republicans quickly tried to portray his measures as government overreach and linked them to efforts to rein in policing.
“I think a lot of it ties back to this whole ‘defund the police’ movement and some of the disruption we had in civil society last year,” Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said on Fox News. “And I think that’s part of, when you start undermining that basic foundation, you start breaking apart the bonds that hold us together and that’s why you see an increase in crime.”
Biden announced a “zero tolerance” policy that would give no leeway to gun dealers who fail to comply with federal law — their licenses to sell would be revoked on a first offense.
The president has already announced a halfdozen executive actions on gun control, including going after “ghost guns,” homemade firearms that lack serial numbers for tracking and often are purchased without background checks.
A number of anti-crime and gun safety groups, including the Brady Campaign and Everytown for Gun Safety, applauded the administration’s efforts.
“The president is helping start a much-needed conversation about reducing violent crime. A greater investment in community interventions will help take a bite out of violent crime,” said Paul Delponte, head of the National Crime Prevention Council. “Strategies that increase public engagement in public safety are proven crime stoppers. Putting more police officers who are trained and certified in crime prevention on the streets of our communities makes sense.”