President Biden waded into one of the most contentious issues in American politics yesterday by announcing new measures to stem gun violence.
Speaking in the White House Rose Garden to an audience that included those who had lost loved ones in mass shootings in recent years, Biden, 78, denounced members of Congress for offering plenty of thoughts and prayers but little in the way of concrete action to stop the deaths of hundreds of people. “Gun violence in this country is an epidemic,” he said to applause. “And it’s an international embarrassment.”
He thanked those who had the courage to campaign on the issue and “to turn pain into purpose and demand that we take the action that gives meaning to the word ‘enough’”. He added: “Enough! Enough! Enough!”
Biden made gun control one of the central pillars of his campaign for the presidency last year but has been accused by some of making slow progress on the issue. The calls for action grew louder last month after attacks in Atlanta and Boulder that left 18 dead.
While mass shootings capture the public’s attention, Biden said that he also saw gun control as a means of limiting individual murders and domestic violence. On average, he said, 316 people were shot somewhere in the US every day and 106 of them died.
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He also referred to the killing of five people, including two children, at a home in South Carolina. Police said that a former professional American footballer was responsible and that he killed himself shortly afterwards.
Mass shootings — defined as incidents in which at least four people are killed at the same time — have fallen during the pandemic but the overall number of gun-related deaths across the US has risen dramatically.
In the latest incident, last night one person was killed and at least five people were reported to have been seriously injured in a shooting at a business in Bryan, Texas, about 100 miles northwest of Houston, police said. The suspect is in custody.
Biden said that he had ordered the Department of Justice to devise gun control measures that he could pass personally, without involving Congress.
He said he would stop the proliferation of so-called ghost guns — kits that allow a firearm to be assembled by the buyer from separate pieces in as little as half an hour. He said he would order manufacturers to include a serial number so that they could be traced, like other guns, and insisted that background checks be carried out on those buying the kits. He would also make it harder for people to modify pistols with arm braces, which stabilise the guns and make them more accurate, effectively turning them into short-barrelled rifles. The suspect in the Boulder shooting allegedly used one to kill ten people.
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Biden said the braces would be subject to the Firearms Act, meaning that anyone buying one would face a minimum fee of $200 and have to give their name to the Department of Justice.
The department will also publish model “red flag” legislation for individual states. The White House does not have the power to pass such a law nationally but the measures, if adopted by states, allow police or family members to petition a court to temporarily remove guns from those presenting a danger to themselves or others.
The department also plans to release a comprehensive report on firearms trafficking, the first since 2000. A new permanent director of the agency overseeing gun control has been appointed.
Biden was joined in the Rose Garden by Kamala Harris, the vice-president, Merrick Garland, the attorney-general, and the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot ten years ago at a campaign event in Tucson, Arizona.
Biden has long been an advocate of tighter gun controls: as a senator in 1994 he was one of the architects of a law that banned assault weapons. The bill passed Congress only after a ten-year “sunset clause” was included, and the legislation expired in 2004 when President Bush did not renew it.
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In a mark of the opposition to gun control in many Republican-controlled areas, last night Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, signed a bill that allows adults aged over 21 to carry a handgun without any checks or training.
The fact that Biden has had to resort to executive orders indicates the intransigence of Congress over the issue. Getting a similar bill to the 1994 Act passed will be almost impossible given the arithmetic in the Senate.
Executive orders allow the president to quickly make federal laws but they do not enjoy the backing of Congress and can be undone by a new president.
The House of Representatives, where the Democrats have a bigger majority than the Senate, passed two bills last month aimed at expanding and strengthening background checks for gun buyers, and giving officials longer to vet applicants. Yet the bills have virtually no chance of passing the Senate, where they would need a super-majority of 60 votes, meaning the backing of at least ten Republicans, assuming all Democrats backed them — and that is by no means a given.
