Biden offers gun curbs hours before shooting
PROPOSAL: President unveils first steps aimed at firearms assembled from kits
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden, calling gun violence in the United States “an international embarrassment,” took a set of initial steps Thursday to address the problem, starting with a crackdown on the proliferation of socalled ghost guns, or firearms assembled from kits.
Acknowledging that more aggressive actions such as banning assault weapons, closing background check loopholes and stripping gun manufacturers of their immunity from liability lawsuits would have to wait for action from Congress, he said it was still vital to do what he could on his own.
“We’ve got a long way to go — it seems like we always have a long way to go,” Bi
den said in the Rose Garden weeks after two mass shootings, in Georgia and Colorado, left 18 people dead and put the administration under intense pressure from the left to take action.
Hours after he spoke, a person was killed and five were wounded in a shooting at a cabinet-making business in Bryan. And a day earlier, five people died in a South Carolina shooting blamed on a former NFL player who later killed himself.
While the president’s moves fall far short of the broad legislative changes long sought by proponents of making it harder to buy guns, especially semi-automatic weapons often used in mass shootings, they addressed narrower issues also of intense concern to many Democrats and supporters of gun regulations.
The most substantive of the steps was directing the Justice Department to curb the spread of ghost guns. Kits for these guns can be bought without background checks and allow a gun to be assembled from pieces with no serial numbers.
Biden said he wanted the department to issue a regulation within a month to require that the components in the kits have serial numbers that would allow them to be traced and that the weapons be legally classified as firearms, with the buyers subjected to background checks.
“I want to see these kits treated as firearms under the Gun Control Act,” he said.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives estimated that 10,000 ghost guns were recovered by law enforcement in 2019. Cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore and San Diego have seen significant increases in the number of such guns recovered each year since then.
Ghost guns, experts said, have become particularly appealing to criminal organizations and rightwing extremists who want access to untraceable firearms that don’t require any background checks. They often are linked to shootings in states such as California that have instituted strict gun laws.
The focus on ghost guns also underscored the White House’s intent to address gun violence broadly and not just the mass shootings that get widespread news coverage.
“Ghost guns are disproportionately impacting gun violence in communities of color and undermining states with strong gun laws,” said Christian Heyne, the vice president of policy at Brady: United Against Gun Violence, a prominent proponent of tighter gun laws.
Ghost guns also have been used in some mass shootings, including one in 2013 at Santa Monica College in California in which five people were killed, one in 2017 in Northern California in which a gunman killed his wife and four others, and one in 2019 at a California high school in which a 16-year-old killed two students and injured three others.
Even a modest step such as addressing the issue of ghost guns, which have been in circulation for years, shows how paralyzed the politics surrounding gun control have become.
The Republican Party remains firmly against gun control measures. Action on key gun issues — universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons, for example — remains stalled because of the narrow partisan divide in the Senate and the 60vote requirement imposed by the filibuster.
The president on Thursday outlined several other actions he was taking on his own.
He said he’d require that when a device known as a stabilizing brace effectively transforms a pistol into a short-barrel rifle, that weapon would be subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act. That would subject it to the extra layers of regulation required to own more serious firearms or silencers, including fingerprinting, a background check and a regular renewal of a license.
The gunman in the Boulder, Colo., shooting last month used a pistol with an arm brace, making it more stable and accurate, the president said.
Biden said the Justice Department also would publish model “red flag” legislation for states. The measure would let police officers and family members petition a court to temporarily remove firearms from people who may present a danger to themselves or others.
While the president can’t pass national red flag legislation without Congress, officials said the goal was to make it easier for states to do so.
“Red flag laws can stop mass shooters before they can act out their violent plans,” Biden said, noting that he wanted to see a national red flag law.
Currently, 19 states and Washington, D.C., have such laws.
Biden also announced that the ATF would undertake a new study of criminal gun trafficking, which it hasn’t done since 2000. The study will take into account that modern guns can be made of plastic, printed on a 3D printer or sold in assembly kits.
The president nominated David Chipman, a supporter of tighter gun rules, to lead the agency. It hasn’t had a permanent director since 2015.
Chipman, an adviser to the gun control organization founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is a former agent with the ATF. Giffords left Congress after she was shot in the head in a mass shooting in 2011 in Tucson, Ariz.
In 2006, lawmakers allied with the National Rifle Association enacted a provision making the position of ATF director subject to Senate confirmation. As a result, only one director, Todd Jones, who was nominated by President Barack Obama, has been confirmed over the past 15 years.
The initiatives laid out Thursday by Biden show how much more difficult it has become for Democrats to advance their agenda on guns since he served in the Senate.
In 1993, Biden played a key role in the passage of the landmark Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, named for onetime White House press secretary James Brady, who was shot in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. A year later, Biden helped push through a 10-year ban on assault weapons.
As vice president, he said the worst day in the Obama White House was in 2013, when the Senate rejected the administration’s proposal to expand background checks after the shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26 people, including 20 children.
Biden on Thursday acknowledged there was only so much he could do without Congress.
“This is just a start,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he added, calling gun violence a “blemish on our character as a nation.”