Effort continues administration’s work to prevent mass shootings and homicides that primarily affect Black and Latino communities
The Biden administration has announced the nation’s first federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In a statement released Thursday, the White House said the office will be overseen by Kamala Harris’s office, directed by Stefanie Feldman, a longtime Biden gun policy adviser, and deputy-directed by Greg Jackson and Rob Wilcox, who have led national prevention efforts through the Community Justice Action Fund and Everytown for Gun Safety respectively.
The creation of this office is a continuation of the administration’s work on preventing high-profile mass shootings and local homicides that primarily affect lower-income Black and Latino communities.
“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 said in the announcement.
Isn’t that basically admitting that this new department can’t do anything and just posturing?
Or am I missing something?
Edit: In retrospect, the biggest value this department might have is having it be under Republican leadership down the line. An entire department explicitly against gun violence may cause some in-fighting about reasonable measures… as opposed to the current status quo.
That is of course assuming the entire department doesn’t just get tossed and establishes itself as having some teeth.
I mean, they COULD process stuff like threats, reports, people on watchlists who own guns, etc. to try and prevent the violence.
Not that they likely will but I mean, there is at least something they COULD do.
I mean, those are good ideas… but isn’t that already arguably covered by the FBI?
ATF
Yeah but that doesn’t mean they do it very well. Been plenty of mass shooting from people on a watchlist who legally purchased guns so like, definitely possible to make a department to try and help with that
It’s classic political posturing which is unlikely to result in any real changes. But with the 2024 election coming up, Biden is looking to shore up support from Black and Latino voters. Support among those demographics has been softening and they were instrumental in his win in 2020. While gun violence isn’t just a Black or Latino issue, it has historically polled as more important among those groups; so, some sort of token support for it, along with raising Kamala Harris’s profile, could be seen as having a net positive effect.
As for any sort of real impact, I’d be surprised if it did anything more than put out reports and news. The single most effective change would be to either move handguns under Title II of the National Firearms Act (which was part of it’s original plan) or ban civilian ownership outright. However, the decisions in DC v. Heller and MacDonald V. City of Chicago basically mean that the latter option is off the table. The former option may be more viable, though that could also put the entirety of the National Firearms Act squarely in the cross-hairs of the Supreme Court, which may be a very bad plan right now. Also, any such change to Title II would likely require Congressional action, and the probability of that is probably somewhere between “No” and “Hell No”.
Ultimately, I’d expect the new office to be long on grandstanding and short on action. But, if it ends up driving more minority turnout for the 2024 election, it will have accomplished it’s unstated goal. After that, it’ll lurch along until it gets defunded and/or killed outright the next time a Republican is elected President. And ya, while many of the folks here may hate that idea, it’s likely that will happen again and probably sooner than we all think. Regan won in a landslide less than a decade after Nixon left office in disgrace. And Biden’s win in 2020 was on razor thin margins. The US is pretty close to evenly divided politically, it only takes a small shift for either party to win.
No, this is the classic ‘put the VP on an impossible task so you can say you are doing something now and can take the fall later for failing’