President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were elected with the most ambitious gun reform agenda in decades.
In addition to such long-sought goals as requiring universal background checks and banning the manufacture and sale of assault weapons, their plan calls for prohibiting ghost guns (unregistered and untraceable homemade weapons), creating a federal weapons buy-back program, and directing more than $900 million to community-based violence interruption programs.
Lawmakers may be more inclined to consider community-based violence prevention programs because the pandemic has devastated the economy, exacerbated poverty, left millions without jobs, and increased other risk factors that cause gun sales to soar.
“Biden’s plan is a strong statement of the importance of support for gun safety at both the federal and state levels,” says New York State Senator Brian Kavanagh, founder and chair of American State Legislators for Gun Violence Prevention, a nonprofit association of more than 200 Democratic and Republican members of legislatures from all fifty states.
But, like previous Democratic administrations, Biden and Harris face uphill battles in winning Congressional approval. The last major federal gun control bill, a ban on assault weapons, passed in 1994 and expired in 2004. Gaining Congressional support may be especially difficult this year, as lawmakers struggle to contain the pandemic and revive the economy.
Despite these challenges, advocates for gun control predict that Biden and Harris’s eighteen-point plan will reduce the nation’s grim toll of gun fatalities. Many of its proposed strategies and policies, they say, can be implemented by federal administrative agencies or state and local governments.
“It is one of the strongest proposals we have seen in years because it is based on the extensive experience [that] Biden and Harris have had in their earlier careers,” says Robin Lloyd, managing director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a nonprofit center in San Francisco that tracks gun legislation.
As a Senator in 1993, Biden spearheaded the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which established the federal background check system. The act has kept at least three million people who are legally prohibited from possessing a gun from obtaining one. But, Lloyd explains in a phone interview, some people with criminal records and other disqualifying conditions have been able to acquire weapons because the checks must be completed in three business days or else the sale automatically goes through.
To close this loophole, Biden intends to propose federal legislation to extend the timetable to ten business days. During his first 100 days as President, he will also order the FBI to prepare an analysis of steps that various federal agencies can take to ensure timely completion.
Executive actions like those recommended by a gun violence task force, which was led by Biden when he served as Vice President, can be very helpful when logjams occur in Congress, Lloyd says. President Barack Obama made extensive use of them when he couldn’t get Congress to pass legislation after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
“To build on Biden’s experience,” Lloyd explains, the Giffords Law Center worked with groups including the nonprofit Center for American Progress “to come up with a roundup on how best to accomplish more than three dozen ideas for executive actions by the White House, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other Cabinet agencies.”
Lloyd lauds Harris’s credentials as a California prosecutor and attorney general who supported bans on assault weapons like those used in the Las Vegas shooting of 2017, which killed sixty people and wounded hundreds.
“Senator Kamala Harris has never held back from taking on the gun lobby and fighting for policies that save lives,” said the center’s namesake, former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona and a gun violence survivor. She called Harris a “fierce, compassionate, and strong leader who is willing to fight for progress.”
Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, commends Biden and Harris for approaching the issue from a public-health perspective.
“This ensures that the role of guns in suicides, domestic violence, and accidental deaths of children in homes where firearms are present will be considered in designing solutions,” says Horwitz in a phone interview. “Although 24,432 Americans died of firearm suicide compared to 13,958 people who died of firearm homicide in 2018, suicides tend to be overlooked.”
Horwitz cites the example of Virginia, which in early 2020 became the nineteenth state to pass a “red flag” law—Washington, D.C., also has one. These laws allow law enforcement and family members to obtain a court order to temporarily remove firearms from loved ones who are suicidal, have expressed thoughts of harming others, have exhibited irrational behavior, or are abusing substances.
“More states may do so in 2021 because the Biden plan provides funds to states that have passed ‘red flag’ laws and directs the Department of Justice to provide technical assistance to states considering such legislation,” Horwitz says.
Besides federal legislation to prohibit individuals convicted of hate crimes from purchasing or owning firearms, the plan calls for $900 million to be spent on community-based, violence-prevention initiatives, which would target forty cities with high homicide rates. Biden cites estimates that more than 12,000 lives could be saved during the eight-year initiative.
Operation Ceasefire, a strategy for educating young people about the dangers of gun violence, has been used in Boston, Oakland, and other cities to reduce gun violence and illegal gun possession. After identifying young people who are at high risk for gun violence, prosecutors, police, and community leaders host meetings where the young people can meet with parents of children who have been killed by guns, crime victims, and formerly incarcerated individuals. The young people are also offered job training, educational programs, and other support.
Another promising approach: hospital-based gun violence intervention programs, which regard hospitalization for violent injuries as an ideal time to intervene and seek to prevent future harm. Participants are given information on mental health programs, court advocacy, housing, and other services. Case managers follow up for several months, explains Horwitz.
Lawmakers may be more inclined to consider community-based violence prevention programs because the pandemic has devastated the economy, exacerbated poverty, left millions without jobs, and increased other risk factors that cause gun sales to soar, Horwitz says.
Almost 1.7 million guns were sold in the United States in November 2020, a 50 percent increase from November 2019, according to The Trace, a nonprofit online magazine that tracks firearm sales.
In 2020, the FBI conducted 39.7 million firearm background checks, a record high. But these numbers include various checks that did not lead to firearm buys. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, according to spokesperson Mark Oliva, applied a more limited criterion to come up with its own tally of 21.1 million checks in 2020, a 59 percent increase over 2019 and “by far a record” for U.S. gun sales.
Although the pandemic caused many state legislatures to adjourn early in 2020, forty-two bills to curb gun violence were passed in thirteen states and the District of Columbia, the Giffords Law Center reports. That brings the total number of laws passed since the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018 to 179. Measures include laws to combat domestic violence, improve gun safety technology, and eliminate ghost guns, all aspects that are included in the Biden plan.
“New York and four other states have taken the lead in passing legislation that will eliminate ghost guns, which have become a major problem for law enforcement agencies because they cannot be traced,” says Kavanagh, of American State Legislators for Gun Violence Prevention.
Unlike traditional firearms, these homemade weapons are assembled from kits that are easily purchased online or from blueprints for 3D printers. Criminals, drug traffickers, and gangs use them because they don’t have a serial number or other markings that identify the weapon’s creator, original owner, or first purchaser.
Gun trafficking, which allows guns to move from states with weak gun laws into states with strong laws, will be another priority of state legislatures, Kav- anagh says. Studies of guns used in crimes in Chicago, New York, and other cities in states that have strong laws have found that a majority of the firearms were trafficked from other nearby states with weak laws.
Requiring background checks on gun sales can help states identify when one person buys a gun on behalf of someone else, a major method of trafficking.
Jacob D. Charles, executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, notes that, if states pass key parts of the Biden plan, it may help secure federal legislation.
“State laws on assault weapons have been held Constitutional, but there may be a challenge if states pass a law stating that an individual must have a permit to carry a gun in public,” Charles says in a phone interview. “The Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case established a Second Amendment right to use a gun for self-defense in the home in the federal enclave of Washington, D.C., but the Supreme Court has yet to rule conclusively whether openly carrying a gun in public falls within the Second Amendment.”
Traditionally, the gun debate has been controlled by the National Rifle Association, which has favored Republicans in Congress and the states. The NRA’s influence declined in 2020 after prosecutors in New York State and Washington, D.C., announced that they would seek to dissolve the organization because its top leaders misused a charity fund, redirecting the money for lavish expenditures for themselves. In mid-January, the group filed for bankrupcy protection and announced plans to re-incorporate in Texas.
In 2020, the group spent $23 million on federal races, less than half its record-setting 2016 total, when it helped Donald Trump and other Republicans get elected.
“The NRA will continue to be a powerful lobby in Washington, D.C., and state capitals in 2021 because people who support gun rights are deeply committed to the cause,” Charles predicts. “Members who leave will join groups like Gun Owners of America and the National Association for Gun Rights that have increased in size and influence” under Trump.
To meet the challenge, gun-safety organizations are seeking to ensure that gun safety will be front and center during the Biden Administration. In December and January, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence sponsored a series of virtual events about data-driven solutions to gun suicides and other aspects of the Biden-Harris plan.
The Giffords Law Center and the Brady Campaign filed an amicus brief in December in support of a lawsuit brought by four cities and represented by Everytown for Gun Safety in federal court to compel the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to regulate the parts used to make ghost guns as firearms under the federal Gun Control Act. The lawsuit accuses the agency of “violating federal law and refusing to take action to protect the public” by failing to address “the unique threat posed by ghost guns.”
“This case is about keeping guns out of the hands of individuals with dangerous histories,” the complaint says. Maybe, under new federal leadership, this is something that could happen.