President Joe Biden, speaking from Monterey Park, Calif. on Tuesday, said he plans to issue a latest executive order to combat gun violence — lower than two months after a mass shooting during Lunar Latest Yr celebrations rocked that community.
Biden’s order will direct Justice Department officials to extend using background checks for gun buyers and promoting protected storage of firearms. It should also call for working with law enforcement to make sure the bipartisan gun control law passed last 12 months, following mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, Latest York, is being put to full use.
The order will ask the U.S. Attorney General’s office to take whatever regulatory actions can be found to get the U.S. as near 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 more, to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
The president’s power to enact change is restricted without Congress passing latest gun laws. Though the 2022 gun law was the primary major laws on the difficulty passed in nearly 30 years, Biden said when signing it that it didn’t go so far as he’d like. It 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,” stopping domestic abusers from owning guns.
However the White House says the variety of mass shootings in 2023 alone shows it didn’t go far enough. On Jan. 21, a gunman killed 11 people and injured nine others at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park following a Lunar Latest Yr celebration, marking the deadliest shooting in Los Angeles County’s history. The gunman then drove to a second dance studio, where he was disarmed.
Biden, whose life has been struck by grief after losing his first wife and daughter in a automotive crash and later his son Beau Biden to cancer, spoke on to the family members affected by the tragedy.
“As we gather here today, I do know your hearts are broken but your spirits are strong,” Biden said. “It takes time but I promise you, I promise you, the day will come when the memory of your beloved brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. My prayer for all of you is that day will come before later, but I promise you it should come.”
There have been a minimum of 110 mass shootings in the USA within the two and a half months of 2023, in keeping with the Gun Violence Archive. Greater than 8,300 Americans have died as a result of gun violence because the starting of the 12 months alone, the organization’s data says.
