President Joe Biden will announce the creation of the first-ever federal office of gun violence prevention on Friday, fulfilling a key demand of gun safety activists as legislation remains stalled in Congress, according to two people with direct knowledge of the White House’s plans.
Stefanie Feldman, a longtime Biden aide who previously worked on the Domestic Policy Council, will play a leading role, the people said.
Greg Jackson, executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, and Rob Wilcox, the senior director for federal government affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety, are expected to hold key roles in the office alongside Feldman, who has worked on gun policy for more than a decade and still oversees the policy portfolio at the White House. The creation of the office was first reported by The Washington Post.
What are they going to do that the ATF and FBI don’t already do?
Prevention of gun violence isn’t exactly the remit of either of those agencies. The ATF focuses on the tracking of and illegal sales of guns while the FBI focuses on crimes committed with them (and other crimes, of course). Neither of those are about prevention of gun violence.
A separate agency that can focus more on the social issues that are behind gun violence could act in many ways that neither of the other two agencies could while not having to worry about drawing focus or manpower, from how those two agencies operate.
They could provide free firearm training courses and encourage young people to take them. Which would help with accidents.
A separate agency that can focus more on the social issues that are behind gun violence
I doubt they are going to give this agency the necessary tools to lower poverty and the wealth gap, lower the rate of single parents, increase healthcare affordability, increase housing production, and destroy the culture of degrading those who try to better themselves. These are the issues that cause people to be unhappy enough with life they chose to murder. Happy individuals with productive lives don’t generally decide murder is the correct course of action.
It hardly seems sensible for a government agency designed to prevent gun violence to then go and train people to use them.
All gun use is inherently violent.
Maybe not encourage guns to be sold to cartels, unlike the ATF Fast and Furious program. It was supposed to track firearms going south, but just lost them.
Operation Wide Receiver under GWB did the same thing and had the exact same issues. The thought behind the programs is not bad. Implementation was fucking terrible though.
I do love how Republicans flipped shit about Fast and Furious but none of them had any qualms with GWB’s operation.
People said the same thing about DHS when it was spawned forth into being. Maybe not a great comparison, but I feel like this one has a little more purpose to it other than job creation.
