Biden, eyeing his legacy, signs executive orders on gun safety

Washington: US President Joe Biden, frustrated with congressional inaction on gun violence and seeking to secure the issue as part of his legacy, said Thursday that he was using his executive authority to improve school preparedness and to stem the tide of untraceable weapons and devices that make firearms more deadly.

Biden made the announcement at a packed and poignant ceremony in the East Room of the White House, where he was introduced by the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, Randall Woodfin. Woodfin’s brother was killed by gun violence, and his city has been grieving after a mass shooting left four people dead last week. Scores of activists and gun violence survivors attended.

The event was timed to the first anniversary of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which Biden created last year after signing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major gun safety bill in nearly 30 years. It was also a chance for Biden to pass the baton to the official who heads that office: Vice President Kamala Harris, who is leaning into gun violence prevention as an issue as she campaigns to succeed Biden.

“We know how to stop these tragedies, and it is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away,” said Harris, who spoke before Biden and who has said while campaigning that she owns a firearm for self-protection. “I am in favor of the Second Amendment, and I believe we need to reinstate the assault weapons ban.”

She was referring to a provision in the 1994 crime bill, spearheaded by Biden when he was a senator, that banned certain types of military-style assault weapons for 10 years. The ban expired in 2004, when Congress refused to renew it.

The executive orders, which Biden signed at the conclusion of the ceremony, do not have the force of law. Should former President Donald Trump win the White House in November, he could easily reverse them.

One established a new task force to assess the threat posed by untraceable weapons known as ghost guns, including 3D-printed firearms, as well as by conversion devices that can turn semiautomatic guns into military-style machine guns.

The other directs top federal officials to evaluate research on how to conduct effective and age-appropriate active-shooter drills that will not traumatize students. Sari Kaufman, who survived the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, said she welcomed that effort.

“Gun violence and the fear of gun violence impacts every community,” said Kaufman, who introduced Harris at the event. “School shootings are adding to this fear and anxiety. While we must be prepared, we should not be traumatizing students.”

Biden and Harris used Thursday’s ceremony to claim credit for a reduction in the number of homicides and mass shootings over the past year. White House officials cited a Justice Department report showing a drop in all murders, not just those involving guns, and data from the Gun Violence Archive, an independent research group, showing a drop in mass shootings.

But the data is not as promising as the White House suggests.

Gun-related homicides surged in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, and they have not dropped to pre-2020 levels. Gun-related suicides have gone up, and firearms remain the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers between ages 1 and 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Firearms kill an average of 132 people in the United States every day, the CDC says. And there have been more than 400 mass shootings this year as of Thursday, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four victims or more are either killed or wounded, not including the shooter. Jeffrey W. Swanson, an expert in gun violence prevention at Duke University, said mass shootings accounted for less than 0.5% of all gun homicides.

“You can see that if there’s a mass shooting today, four people might have died, but the same day, 135 other people died of gun-related injuries,” Swanson said.

Still, Swanson and other experts say the Biden administration’s policies may well have been among a number of factors — including improvement in the economy and the job market — that have contributed to a reduction in violent crime. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, for instance, provided support for states to enact “red flag laws,” which enable judges to issue temporary civil restraining orders barring dangerous people from purchasing or possessing firearms. Swanson’s research has found that the laws save lives.

Biden said Thursday that he intended to continue his work on gun violence prevention after he left office.

“We still have more to do, but the steps we’ve taken so far in reducing gun violence and saving lives are real,” he said. “We have to keep going.”