President Joe Biden has announced the White House will create a first-of-its-kind office dedicated to gun violence prevention.
The newly formed Office of Gun Violence Prevention will be under the stewardship of Vice President Kamala Harris and Stefanie Feldman, a policy adviser who has worked closely with Biden on gun-related matters. The decision is a major step forward for advocacy groups who have been campaigning for gun violence prevention measures from the federal government.
“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. “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.”
The office represents a significant stride towards comprehensive gun violence prevention. One of its key mandates will be to oversee the implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a 2022 law hailed as the most extensive gun violence prevention measure in the past three decades. This legislation was precipitated by the Uvalde school shooting in Texas, where a lone gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school.
Biden has also recruited two prominent figures in the fight against gun violence as deputy directors of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention: Greg Jackson, a survivor of gun violence himself and the Community Justice Action Fund executive director, and Rob Wilcox, the senior director of federal government affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety.
The White House’s announcement comes on the heels of a series of actions taken by the Biden administration to address gun violence comprehensively. One notable move was the proposal of rules requiring for-profit firearms dealers to obtain federal licenses and conduct criminal background checks, a measure aimed at tightening gun sales regulations. Biden also signed an executive order in March to bolster background checks.
The urgent need for such measures becomes clear when examining recent data from the Gun Violence Prevention Database. So far in 2023, 31,394 have died from gun violence-related incidents. One in five Americans know someone killed from gun violence; experts believe this year will have the most mass shootings in American history.
