President Biden Executive Actions On Gun Control: Read It For Yourself
Photo by Mike Nozell
President Biden announced six executive actions on gun control to address what he called the “public health crisis” of gun violence.
From the White House “Fact Sheet” on the Executive Actions On Gun Control:
The Justice Department, within 30 days, will issue a proposed rule to help stop the proliferation of “ghost guns.” We are experiencing a growing problem: criminals are buying kits containing nearly all of the components and directions for finishing a firearm within as little as 30 minutes and using these firearms to commit crimes. When these firearms turn up at crime scenes, they often cannot be traced by law enforcement due to the lack of a serial number. The Justice Department will issue a proposed rule to help stop the proliferation of these firearms.
The Justice Department, within 60 days, will issue a proposed rule to make clear when a device marketed as a stabilizing brace effectively turns a pistol into a short-barreled rifle subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act. The alleged shooter in the Boulder tragedy last month appears to have used a pistol with an arm brace, which can make a firearm more stable and accurate while still being concealable.
The Justice Department, within 60 days, will publish model “red flag” legislation for states. Red flag laws allow family members or law enforcement to petition for a court order temporarily barring people in crisis from accessing firearms if they present a danger to themselves or others. The President urges Congress to pass an appropriate national “red flag” law, as well as legislation incentivizing states to pass “red flag” laws of their own. In the interim, the Justice Department’s published model legislation will make it easier for states that want to adopt red flag laws to do so.
The Administration is investing in evidence-based community violence interventions. Community violence interventions are proven strategies for reducing gun violence in urban communities through tools other than incarceration. Because cities across the country are experiencing a historic spike in homicides, the Biden-Harris Administration is taking a number of steps to prioritize investment in community violence interventions.
The American Jobs Plan proposes a $5 billion investment over eight years to support community violence intervention programs. A key part of community violence intervention strategies is to help connect individuals to job training and job opportunities.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is organizing a webinar and toolkit to educate states on how they can use Medicaid to reimburse certain community violence intervention programs, like Hospital-Based Violence Interventions.
Five federal agencies are making changes to 26 different programs to direct vital support to community violence intervention programs as quickly as possible. These changes mean we can start increasing investments in community violence interventions as we wait on Congress to appropriate additional funds. Read more about these agency actions here.The Justice Department will issue an annual report on firearms trafficking. In 2000, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) issued a report summarizing information regarding its investigations into firearms trafficking, which is one way firearms are diverted into the illegal market where they can easily end up in the hands of dangerous individuals. Since the report’s publication, states, local, and federal policymakers have relied on its data to better thwart the common channels of firearms trafficking. But there is good reason to believe that firearms trafficking channels have changed since 2000, for example due to the emergence of online sales and proliferation of “ghost guns.” The Justice Department will issue a new, comprehensive report on firearms trafficking and annual updates necessary to give policymakers the information they need to help address firearms trafficking today.
The President will nominate David Chipman to serve as Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. ATF is the key agency enforcing our gun laws, and it needs a confirmed director in order to do the job to the best of its ability. But ATF has not had a confirmed director since 2015. Chipman served at ATF for 25 years and now works to advance commonsense gun safety laws.
Quick! Quick! Refund the police!Report
RoflolReport
Well, homicides are spiking, after all.Report
Thanks, Andrew.Report
Looking for information on Chipman, I ran across this gem of a sentence in a CNN article:
“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common-sense steps that will save lives in the future,” Biden said last month.Report
A) Ghost Guns – This is a problem government can’t really solve any more than they could solve the drug problem. Not sure what Biden hopes to do, but it won’t do squat.
B) Red Flag laws – This is going to depend on the guidance given. It’s not a bad idea for the feds to publish model laws, but if they publish a model law that ignores the rights of gun owners, that’s not going to be very helpful.Report
Re: (A) I’m curious about the assertion that these are being used in crimes. Like are there statistics?
Also I assume he’s talking about home builds from 80% lowers and similar stuff? Not that it sounds as cool and terrifying as ‘ghost guns,’ but wondering how you even define these things.Report
I’d like to see those stats as well. I’m sure they do show up, but I suspect they show up in TV crime dramas more often than actual crimes.Report
The problem is always the issue of “you can’t buy a gun online!”
Well. what’s a gun?
A gun consists of X, Y, and Z.
Is X a gun? Um… no.
Is Y a gun? Um… no.
Is Z a gun? Um… no.
Great. I’ll order an X from Home Depot, a Y from Lowe’s, and a Z from Amazon. Some assembly required.
Don’t forget to pick up a fuel filter for your mobility scooter!Report
Lots of things fit that pattern. Guns very much fit that pattern.
Like I said in a recent post comment, better off looking at ammo. Ammo is not something that you can just assemble at home after a trip to Ace Hardware. Casings, smokeless powder, and primers are all very tricky to make at home. Bullets are easy, and you can assemble all the ammo parts at home with a press, but you still need to buy powder and primers.
Of course, as our batteries and other electronics improve, I suspect this will start being a growing concern.Report
PS The coilgun I linked to has a muzzle energy that is about 5% of the muzzle energy of a .22LR. I wouldn’t want to get hit with either, but the coilgun is not nearly as lethal.
Yet…Report
It’s like the Navy’s rail guns, one of their solutions to some of the new weapons they expect to be used against them. The rail gun per se isn’t the problem. The problem is that you need a many-megawatt generator to charge the ultra-capacitor banks that can discharge fast enough to produce the desired muzzle energy. Hundreds of times per minute. And power electronics that can handle switching that much current that fast.Report
Yep, but a personal arm doesn’t need to push a 2 kg slug to Mach 7. Honestly, if you had a modern coil gun loaded with something closer to a hunting broad head, rather than a steel dowel rod, you wouldn’t need much muzzle velocity.
Sure, it won’t punch through armor like a rifle bullet, but if you aren’t worried your target will be armored…Report
According to fencing folk lore, the reason epee tips have springs that require 750 grams to close the contacts is that 750 grams is enough force to achieve four inches of penetration and reach vital organs. (Folk lore does not need to be consistent about units of measurement.)
I’ve never attacked a human or ballistic gel with a sharpened epee. I have had the chance to attack a large pumpkin with such a weapon. You just sort of casually get 10 or 12 inches of penetration, limited by where the blade gets wider. The epee’s ancestors were the weapon of choice for urban self defense in Europe for a couple of centuries.
I was present at a freak training accident where a fencer’s epee blade broke about four inches back from the tip, and in a continuation of the move he hit his opponent’s calf. In, several inches of penetration through the muscle, out slick as a whistle on the retreat. And that was a pretty jagged tip, not one that had been sharpened properly.Report
Owwww!!!Report
Yeah, 3D printed guns were a joke a decade ago.
“They’ll blow up!” quickly became “they’re only good for one shot!” (which did not anticipate the counter-argument “which makes them a good shower gun!”).
If railguns are becoming 3D printable, the limiting thing is the amount of copper it’ll cost to make one.Report
It’s interesting to look at a gun as one of those crazy AI things. Like, “we asked the computer to design something that would propel bits of metal at high speed, it came up with a device that literally explodes and part of the top shoots off, and afterwards it just iterated on that idea”.
Like, yeah that seems to require a certain design solution, but the original question was not “something that explodes and a part of the shrapnel is directed in a way that we find useful” but “something that shoots metal bits”…Report
Just check out this guys YouTube channel. The crap he does with plywood and rubber bands…Report
It’s definitely harder in that it makes absolutely no sense to mess with when commercial ammunition is readily available. But while not as easy as making meth I can’t help but think that with the right incentives we might find ourselves with a whole new cadre of amateur chemists trying new things. It isn’t like a trailer never exploded in the sticks before.Report
Making primers at home is doable, although very dangerous.
AFAIK, smokeless powder is very, very difficult to make outside of a lab. Doable, yes, but IIRC the equipment and raw materials are uncommon and expensive.
Still, given the right incentives (like tight controls on ammo), I wouldn’t be surprised to see inventive propellants come about. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see someone come up with a piezoelectric primer.Report
I admittedly don’t have the hard science background to speculate on methods, though I do get it’s a totally different ballpark than fabricating a gun, which really is easy. But I read enough about these highly sophisticated cartel labs in Mexico and find it hard to believe they wouldn’t figure something out if it was suddenly worth their while.Report
Those kinds of orgs would just steal and smuggle what they needed.
It’s really a question of who are you trying to impact. You won’t impact the cartels. You might impact the street gangs, assuming the cartels aren’t willing to arm them. But legalizing drugs will do more to impact the street gangs and cartels than gun control will.
If you want to impact the spree shooter, then ammo controls could have an effect. Maybe. Depends on how motivated they are.Report
Long ago when I was young, there were a handful of long-range target shooters who could make better-than-commercial ammunition. They customized the load as long as they were at it, but mostly they were after every round being exactly the same.
I assume that the best of the match grade commercial ammunition today is more consistent than what can be done by hand, given the vast improvement in process technology.Report
More and more states are legalizing pot. The War on Drugs might finally be going away…Report
Looking deeper into some of these things… I can see why 2nd Amendment Enthusiasts might have less to worry about than you’d think.
Like, dig this part:
This is directing a department.
To change a rule.
What’s the rule?
It’s about when a brace turns a pistol into a short barreled rifle.
Does the rule make this sort of thing illegal?
I don’t know. (I’m guessing not.)
But even if it did, what does a brace capable of turning a pistol into a short barreled rifle look like when it is not attached to a pistol? Specifically, is it something that you would be able to recognize?
Is it something that looks like something you’ve got sitting in your kitchen or in your garage right now?
If they make these braces illegal, will you be able to be charged for breaking gun laws because of that thing in your kitchen or garage?
The Justice Department is going to issue model “Red Flag” legislation for states.
Like, you guys won’t have to ask lobbyists to make laws for you! You can just use this as a template!
I can easily see California, New York, and Illinois passing this model legislation right away.
Then blaming a lack of change on Indiana or something.
Check this line out:
Golly, what does *THAT* mean???
Oh.
And this part:
Maybe we can finally get a handle on the real numbers of Indiana guns involved in Chicago murders.
Unless they’re ghost guns, of course.
This is, like, really offensive but we’ll see how that shakes out.Report
What the first part will (I assume) do is ‘clarify’ that pistols with such an extension have become what are known as NFA Title II weapons. This puts a number of requirements/restrictions around ownership and transfer. I put clarify in quotes because I assume that the outcome will be to make it less clear what the law is rather than more.Report
I assume that these extensions need to be screwed in or welded or similar to work, right?
Because if it’s just something that can be clipped on/off in a matter of seconds, this has so very many things that can go wrong.
I mean, if I were a 2nd Amendment Enthusiast, I could be tempted to say that these rules are a lot of noise designed to look like forward movement.Report
The easiest thing to do to get a sense of what these are is google ‘pistol conversion kit.’ I believe under the law as it exists today, whether what you have made is legal depends on (i) whether what you have built is designed to be fired by a single hand and (ii) barrel length.
Re: the rules I think it is fair to go in with the understanding that any change of this kind is at absolute best only going to impact rates of people being shot on the margins. Re: movement I think it all depends on what goals one feels we should be moving towards.Report
The parallel is the bump stock. Both are add-ons that make a gun usable in a comparable way to a more regulated gun, but don’t actually convert the gun into the more regulated category. The bump stock ban is an overreach – if you want bump stocks to be illegal, you have to wait for Congress to pass a law.
From what I understand, the number of privately-owned bump stocks that have been turned over to the government numbers in the dozens. But anyone who possesses one has to face the fact that a raid would result in a prison term. That white supremacist Coast Guard guy who was planning to kill people ended up serving time for possession of firearms and drugs, the easiest possible case.Report
There is a class of firearms that are legally pistols, but look an awful lot like a semi-auto rifle (Google “AR Pistol”) for an example.
A pistol brace looks an awful lot like a collapsible stock, but it’s not meant to fit to the shoulder, it’s meant to strap to your forearm to help stabilize your AR pistol.
How much more deadly does it make your AR pistol? That depends on how much practice you’ve had. Bought the gun and brace last week and you’ve put 20 rounds through it at the range? It’ll do jack for you. Put a thousand rounds through it and you’ll be able to refine your shooting enough that it’ll make a difference.
Also, this is the kind of thing you can print at home, or make with stuff from the hardware store.Report
Okay, I googled.
I was wondering if the pistol brace was something that could easily be attached to, oh, any given Ruger pistol. Like if a cop knew he’d be searching a house, he could just have one of these things up his sleeve or something and, if he found a gun, could put it next to the gun and OOOH! OOOH! THIS IS A CLASS 2 GUN FELONY!!!
It looks like it’s not quite that exploitable. Like, the braces that I am seeing are specifically for particular makes/models of gun.
Yeah, it looks like they can be attached/detached/reattached in a matter of seconds, but they aren’t one-size-fits-most.Report
So, anything small enough for an officer to carry into a home should be legal?Report
See it more as a desire to see body cams on at all times during any given search.Report
Basically, this is the Bump Stocks thing again, which was another example of nod-and-a-wink “accessory” sales in the firearms market.
Like, the sort of thing you’d think Responsible Gun Owners would be publicly calling out as a stupid thing that’s just going to get everyone in trouble.Report
Well, bump stocks are a toy.
AR Pistols and braces are useful and help expand the market for firearms to people with disabilities. Of course, if we only limited sales to people with disabilities, such things would not be profitable, or would be very expensive (custom builds kind of thing), or so goes the logic.
But that runs up against, “well, it’s so easy to build an AR from a 80% receiver that anyone can do it” that I have to wonder why custom builds for people with disabilities are prohibitively expensive.
Because they aren’t, folks just want cool, new toys to play with and the BATFEIEIO didn’t bother to put their foot down on this.*
*They are such a wildly inconsistent regulatory agency.Report
Is it prohibitively expensive? The only reason I can think it would be is scarcity of parts, which seems self-evidently not to be the case.Report
That’s kind of my point. If we expected gun makers to produce very limited runs of complete firearms for persons with disabilities, then yes, it would make those weapons expensive, just because it costs money to reconfigure production.
But if it’s merely a question of making a run of short stock barrels and braces, and folks can put it together at home from common parts, it’ll still cost more, but probably not prohibitively so.
It’s an argument with weak evidence. The real argument is that citizens should have access to whatever arms the police have, because that forces folks to step back and look at what the police have access to and start asking if the police really need access to those weapons.Report
It has certainly always struck me as unnecessarily provocative without serving any functional purpose, at least to the extent you can just buy a rifle if that’s what you want. I suppose there are those who really get off on the build and assembly stuff. But yes, the results were predictable.Report
Having had to fill out multiple forms with invasive PII disclosures (in triplicate, in the olden days) I have no problems documenting firearm purchases.
I’m not particularly sanguine about the ‘magic’ that people think Background Checks will do other than thwart someone with a big obvious prohibition… usually a felony. Other than that… mostly wishful thinking owing to the fragmentation of data across multiple states/authorities/medical professionals, etc.
You could, perhaps, campaign on a massive National ID project … hey, we could use it for Voting, and Vaccinations, and Citizenship, and Jobs, and Health Care too! But your mileage may vary on the enthusiasm of various constituencies. But that would be a consistent way to track who’s eligible to own a firearm (and vote, and get a job, and travel, and etc. etc.) Funnily, despite the obvious dangers, I think modern states could make a case for this… but we’d have to make it (and build it) with eyes-wide-open vis-a-vis civil liberties and privacy (and Government desire to control actions… for the children, of course). So I’m potentially ‘gettable’ but realistically skeptical that anyone want this – except for the things they’d like to control/restirct.
So, the next obvious thing is to ignore the person and track the S/N… like a VIN. You *never* give away a VIN without telling the State that, hey, *I* don’t have that VIN, this other guy, Ted, has the VIN… deal with him if there are any problems.
Of course, gun owners are familiar with the old joke that all his guns were lost in a boating accident… fair enough, we don’t typically lose the things attached to our VIN#. But even then, there are a number of baby steps we could take in a solid Gun S/N registry… like warranty, specs/manuals, ease of use for transferring, and a serious fine that if you are ever found in possession of a gun that fell into a lake, be it yours or a real gun you found in a lake, then that’s a big $$$ ticket… so don’t carry/keep guns that aren’t ‘active’ in the registry. Transferring ownership would be as simple as transferring a VIN… I don’t have it, this guy over here has it. Which, is mostly how Gun show sales work anyway… but without the back-ground check that doesn’t really work without the National ID. But, treating the S/N as something you the owner are responsible for… that’s perhaps the only first step that’s politically possible.
There are, I think limited steps we can take to manage the physical control of firearms that don’t threaten/act like ‘Voter Suppression’ techniques… but that’s the level of trust we have to build around to make these things work.Report