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.
Oh, man. Can you imagine the misery of being appointed to this post? Literally half of the government would hate and despise you and would look for ways to undercut you just to have an extra talking point while they stand in the hall talking to Fox News. And to top it off, what could you actually do to affect change? I sympathize with the poor workers of this office.
I don’t think you understand.
People saying Nazis were just doing they’re job are doing that to alleviate them of any responsibility of their work.
I’m saying it’s just a job to highlight how these people probably don’t care about what they’re doing so long as they’re getting paid. As in, who cares if a bunch of strangers hate you so long as you’re getting paid. That’s actually par for the course for a lot of work.
Next time a Republican takes office they will set this department’s budget to 1 dollar, just like the consumer protection bureau. It will get to the point that parts of the government will only work when dems are in charge.
I was really curious to learn more about CFPB’s financing, I found an article about Trump slashing their budget by a quarter but I haven’t been able to find anything about their funding year by year.
It’s turbo fucked if they haven’t refunded them because they’ve returned billions to consumers by prosecuting fraudulent organizations like Wells Fargo!!
That’s “Starve the Beast” politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Everyone should know what this is and how and why it is done.
In short, Republicans want to starve a department of funding to a level below which they can not properly function. Then they can claim that agency isn’t doing it’s job, so we might as well cut it altogether. They are trying to set up these departments and programs to fail and can come in and claim they are saving taxpayers money. What they are really doing is making it easier for corporations and the ultra rich to pollute or side-step their tax obligations. Kind of hard to claim someone is a tax cheat if there isn’t an IRS to audit them. Same with the EPA, Amtrak, USPS, DoEducation, and a host of other departments.
Once again, we can thank Reagan for this mess.
They’ve got to earn their $16 million a year from the gun lobby by doing even less than they did back before Sandy Hook, when it was only $8 million a year.
Isn’t it just grand to look back on the last 365 days of gun violence and see what figures people put on it? Tens of thousands of lives. Hundreds of them children.
The pro-gun crowd will bury them just to avoid inconvenience. They don’t want to wait for their guns, pass a background check, demonstrate they know how to responsibly handle them or store them securely.
Sure, they’ll jerk themselves raw as they publicly congratulate themselves for doing any of those, but the moment someone wants to turn “suggestions” into “laws”, they’re all too happy to be represented by overweight men stuffed into plate carriers.
For the politicians and manufacturers though, it’s strictly business.
Republicans get $16 million a year and a bloc of voters who will tolerate all manner of horrific acts, as long as they happen to other people.
In return, they insist that we mustn’t change a thing until every man, woman and child in America has been completely cured of mental illness, to a level far beyond current medical science, so perfectly that nobody ever relapses and all in the few days it takes to load up on semi-automatic firearms.
Not only can you buy their souls, they’re not even that expensive.
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.
Whoo boy, that’s gonna set off the crazies. And finally Rick Scott will know which Federal agency he wants to eliminate when asked the question. I don’t see this as particularly effective or constructive going into an election year. But what do I know?
Yep going harder on gun control stuff is going to do nothing but lose votes for Democrats. Because if you’re already anti-gun then you’re voting [D] anyway right? Personally I’m never voting for any politician who proposes to limit any freedoms. I’m pro-freedom only. I don’t really have much to vote for these days.
