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.
about time
What are they going to do that the ATF and FBI don’t already do?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“After months of research, we have written a 1000 page report proving the solution is fewer guns.”
Republicans: “MORE GUNS! ARM EVERYONE!”
Why does America have some of the highest rates of gun violence in any of the developed countries, Blamemeta?
I don’t know SMCF, why specifically ‘gun’? Is the tool more important than the act?
If the Dems would drop their anti-gun fight, they would win every election in a landslide and we wouldn’t have the ridiculous government we have now.
EDIT: Lemmy and guns in a nutshell right here.
If Americans would stop fetishizing guns to the point of sacrificing children to the altar of their bang-bang toys, we could actually have a respectable society.
Nah. I’ve thought about this.
If they couldn’t use guns, they’d use cars. If they can’t use cars, they’d focus on torture. i.e. instead of trying to kill as many people as possible, just try to make whoever you catch suffer as much as possible before pulling the plug.
These are all band-aids to avoid addressing the real problem: those who feel they have nothing to live for so they take their anger out on society.
The solution to the problem is reducing the disparity in wealth. It won’t eliminate all of them, but it will severely reduce them. This is why nobody is talking about it. The ruling class has been successful, again, in getting us to squabble over bullshit to avoid addressing the real issue, which is always the money.
CDC counts gun and vehicular deaths at about the same, year in and out. Thing is, I can avoid suicide (43% or so), bad people and places. I cannot avoid random people killing me on a stroll or a drive.
Where’s your passion for dealing with death on the road? Because guns don’t scare me a bit. Driving does.
“It’s worth the dead children to get elected” isn’t the best of campaign slogans
Pedophiles don’t care about the law either it seems, so would you say we should just get rid of all laws pertaining to that?
Its already illegal to murder, so adding additional crimes to gun possetion is essentially a proxy for making murder double illegal. If a criminal doesn’t care about murder laws, possession laws aren’t going to bother them.
Your metaphor would be more like saying: pedophilia is already illegal, make giving candy to children who aren’t yours with intent to abduct illegal too. Essentially make pedophilia double illegal (in this instance).
heres the thing though - criminals arent known for caring about laws or federal offices
Here’s the thing though - putting basic steps in place to make it more difficult for criminals to get a gun isn;t a bad idea.
That’s just blatantly false. Actual scientific study on gun violence has found that gun restrictions, such as the assault weapons ban, had meaningful reductions in gun crime in the years following its implementation.
Most guns used in crimes are obtained legally.
