U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced he is creating the first-ever federal office of gun violence prevention in an effort to tackle an ever-increasing rate of mass shootings across the country that he called an “epidemic.”
The White House said Vice-President Kamala Harris will oversee the new office, which will be led by director Stefanie Feldman, a longtime Biden administration aide who has overseen federal gun violence reduction efforts.
The office will coordinate efforts across the federal government and will offer help and guidance to states struggling with increasing gun violence, while taking the lead on implementation of the bipartisan gun legislation signed into law last year and additional executive orders signed by Biden. It will also look at further actions the White House can take unilaterally, as further congressional support for gun safety laws appears slim.
“I’ll continue to urge Congress to take commonsense actions that the majority of Americans support like enacting universal background checks and banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” Biden said in a statement.
“But in the absence of that sorely-needed action, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention along with the rest of my administration will continue to do everything it can to combat the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing our families, our communities, and our country apart.”
Biden and Harris formally marked the opening of the new office at a White House event on Friday, where both leaders pointed to the incredible harm that constant mass shootings has on survivors’ mental health.
“After every mass shooting, we hear a simple message … do something. Please do something,” he said from the Rose Garden, where he was joined by lawmakers and families of victims of gun violence. “My administration has been working relentlessly to do something.”
Harris said while this violence impacts all communities, it does not do so equally, noting communities of colour are far more likely to suffer.
“I have seen with my own eyes what a bullet does to the human body,” she said. “We cannot normalize any of this.”
Greg Jackson, the executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, and Everytown for Gun Safety’s Rob Wilcox will serve as deputy directors of the office. Both have been touched by gun violence: Jackson himself survived a shooting in Washington, D.C., in 2013, and Wilcox’s cousin was fatally shot in 2001.
Plans to create the office were first reported earlier this week by the Washington Post and the Associated Press.
Firearms are the top cause of death for children in the U.S., and so far this year 220 children younger than 11 have died by guns and 1,054 between the ages of 12 and 17 have died. As of 2020, the firearm mortality rate in the U.S. for those under age 19 is 5.6 per 100,000. The next comparable is Canada, with 0.08 deaths per 100,000.
But Republican support for gun restrictions is slipping a year after Congress passed the most comprehensive firearms control legislation in decades with bipartisan support, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Most Democrats, 92 per cent, want gun laws made stronger, in line with their views in a UChicago Harris/AP-NORC poll conducted in July 2022. But Republican desire for more expansive legislation has dropped to 32 per cent from 49 per cent last summer and independents’ support has also declined slightly to 61 per cent from 72 per cent.
Despite the political divide, both sides believe it’s important to reduce mass shootings that plague the nation, the poll found.
As of Thursday, there have been at least 35 mass killings in the U.S. so far in 2023, leaving at least 171 people dead, not including shooters who died, according to a database maintained by the AP and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.
That puts the country on a faster pace for mass killings than in any other year since 2006, according to the database, which defines a mass killing as one in which four or more people are killed, not including the perpetrator, within a 24-hour period.
The 2022 law passed by Congress toughened background checks for the youngest gun buyers, sought to keep firearms from domestic violence offenders and aimed to help states put in place red flag laws that make it easier to take weapons away from people judged to be dangerous.
Yet some states have been resistant to enacting those red flag laws. After a mass shooting at a school in Nashville this year, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee urged state lawmakers to pursue “common-sense” restrictions including a red flag rule. But a special session called to address those calls failed to yield any concrete actions, and descended into partisan bickering.
Two Black Democratic lawmakers who were aggressively pushing for gun control measures in the wake of the Nashville shooting were expelled from the state legislature this past spring, only to be voted back in by their constituents.
The new office fulfills a key demand of gun safety activists who banded together as a coalition to endorse Biden for president in 2024.
“The creation of an Office of Gun Violence Prevention in the White House will mark a turning point in how our federal government responds to an epidemic that plagues every state and every community in America,” said Kris Brown, president of the gun safety group Brady, which has advocated for the office since 2020.
“Tackling this epidemic will take a whole-of-government approach, and this new office would ensure the executive branch is focused and coordinated on proven solutions that will save lives.”
—with files from the Associated Press