Biden Announces New Plans to Curb Gun Violence

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden, speaking from Monterey Park, California, said he plans to issue a new executive order to combat gun violence.

Biden’s order will direct Justice Department officials to increase the use of background checks for gun buyers and promoting safe storage of firearms. 

It will also call for working with law enforcement to ensure the bipartisan gun control law passed last year, following mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, is being put to full use.

The order will ask the US Attorney General’s office to take whatever regulatory actions are available to get the US as close to implementing universal background checks as possible without congressional approval.

“Let’s be clear: None of this absolves Congress’s responsibility to act, to pass universal background check, eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability,” Biden said, adding he was “determined, once again, to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”

The president’s power to enact change is limited without Congress passing new gun laws. Though the 2022 gun law was the first major legislation on the issue passed in nearly 30 years, Biden said when signing it that it did not go as far as he’d like. 

He expanded gun purchase background checks on people ages 18 to 21, outlined incentives for states to pass red flag laws allowing individuals to petition courts to remove weapons from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, and closed the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” preventing domestic abusers from owning guns.

There have been at least 110 mass shootings in the US in the two and a half months of 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Over 8,300 Americans have died due to gun violence since the beginning of the year alone, according to the organization’s data.