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.
So…department of education?
Or the EPA, or the CDC, or the IRS, or…
You’d be surprised by how much oil companies hate the DOT.
What next, the FAA and FCC?
Also knowing that you’re guaranteed to be “downsized” on the first day of the next party change in the White House.
And imagine how much security you’ll have to hire to keep yourself from getting shot.
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Half?
How few people do you think work for the government?
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.
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“Banana Republican” while Dementia Joe didn’t even leave his basement to run.
Why would Republicans axe more money for cops? This has always been what they wanted
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.
If your goal is to lower deaths from cars, would it “hardly seem sensible for a government agency to train people to use them”? Training lowers accident rates.
There’s probably a few other things that can be done but that’s generally correct. Frankly, the solution to gun violence is to remove all guns. Make the situation impossible. That won’t happen and neither will appropriate legal restrictions to ownership with the country the way it is, so training and other preventive measures are the next best thing.
We’re not talking about cars here, however. We’re talking about guns. All gun use is violent, so the logical way to reduce gun violence is to not use them at all. The same isn’t true for cars.
Thanks for the false equivalency, though.
This comment is on par with those that seek to reduce abortions by banning them. In both cases, you have absolute positions “no guns”, “no abortions” that ignore the fact that people have decided they need these things and are going to get them. Similarly, those positions ignore real, practical steps, that help address the underlying issues.
The smarter thing for reducing abortions would be free contraceptives.
The smarter thing for reducing gun violence (when it’s accidental) is absolutely what the other person here said, train people how to use them properly and safely.
Accidental firings are an issue but are honestly not a huge source of deaths overall. The main issues are illegally sourced guns from theft or straw purchases. Those can be mitigated by safe storage laws, gun registration, and current permits for gun purchases.
safe storage laws, gun registration, and current permits for gun purchases.
And we’re not gonna do that either. I shall decline to participate in any of those.
Except you get abortions at the recommendation of a medical professional, who is recommending guns and for what?
Hunters for hunting… yes they do still exist. Speed/target shooters… because they find the sport fun. Police officers… because you’re being stalked(?)
The point isn’t to justify guns more, less, or equal to abortions; they’re not the same thing. What they are is things that different people come to different ways, that have desirable and undesirable characteristics.
The point is we can increase the desirable and decrease the undesirable with small (from a cultural view) changes or we can get nowhere with rage inducing “all or nothing” takes.
I think you’re missing the point: the analogy of medical to commodity doesn’t work at all because medical decisions have built in gatekeepers
I would be all for a law where in order to buy a new gun you had to sit down with somebody who asked you why you wanted to have a gun and even just like handed you a pamplet with statistical gun ownership risks. That’s literally a wing of gun control legislation: background checks, licensing, mental health screening, etc would be the analog of the doctor, referal, etc in the comparison, but it doesn’t exist.
But post 1980s NRA interepretation of the 2nd amendment in the US is as a right to purchase them as a commodity. Abortion is a wholly different thing where a medical professional guides somebody through a process with risks that must be stated and evaluated.
Comparing a commodity model to a medical process just undermines whatever point you think you’re trying to make.
Another false equivalence about an unrelated subject.
No, it’s not a false equivalence at all. It speaks to the failure of absolutism to get ANYTHING done.
If you can’t see how comparing abortions to guns is obviously a false equivalence, then you’re clearly not interested in having a rational conversation.
All gun use is inherently violent.
Laughs in Olympic Match Shooting & Pentathalon.
Clearly you’re not interested in having a rational conversation.
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Lmao, right, because you’re extremely niche use case should dictate how the rest of the world should adapt around you. how incredibly selfish.
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.
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Actually collect data on police shootings?
Shoot your cat and goldfish instead of just your spouse and your dog
You’re thinking of the police.
No, that’s what this is in addition to.
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.
Now you’re just scaring me.
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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?
If they focus on policy that isn’t gun control it will help. If they only exist to push gun control you’re prolly right. Either way, gun stores will prolly win when the nutters go buy more rifles.
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.
Bssed
It’s a nice thought.
To go along with all the prayers.
An office of prayers is strictly forbidden by the first amendment.
3, 2, 1…here come the gun nuts…
As expected every time guns are brought up in a political context, the comments are already full of people talking past each other while ignoring the real issues.
It is exactly as difficult to get rid of guns in this country as it would be to get rid of the electoral college, and the electoral college has done thing like lead directly to the covid pandemic being far worse than it had to be because Trump fired the guy we had in position to warn everyone if China leaked a pandemic.
Instead of discussing that, all you’re going to find in a thread like this is back and forth about getting rid of guns (nearly impossible) or decrying the department as redundant (the DHS is proof this is also meaningless) or the like.
If something is not realistically achievable in the short term, that means we shouldn’t be able to talk about it?
I disagree. If we limit discourse only to the immediately achievable we stop talking about how things should be, and how best to get there. Sometimes change happens overnight, sometimes it takes decades. It’s worth talking about.
It definitely feels like a lost cause banning guns. It’s part of the culture. When we banned guns in Australia after one single mass shooting, I don’t believe Australia had nearly as much of a gun loving culture. It was still seen as a tool in the country side for hunting and such. I don’t know the answer to changing culture. It’ll take generations possibly. Smoking was seen like an everyday thing in the 60s. Now it’s disgusting. Perception can change eventually.
Most people are not asking to “get rid of guns.” Most people are asking for restrictions that keep people safe, not least our school children, and a ban on military-style weapons like AR-15s. That’s not unreasonable nor impossible.
You claim that no one is asking to get rid of guns, and then call for a ban on an entire class of firearms (and a vague one, “military-style weapons”, which is intentionally vague and demonstrates a lack of knowledge of firearms).
Make a decision please.
The 2nd Amendment was not written with AR-15s or any other military-style weapons in mind. A full ban on those weapons is reasonable and possible.
With that logic, the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to the internet, phones, television, photos, or video.
Your understanding of the second amendment (and firearms in general) is flawed, and any attempt to disarm the working class shall be frustrated. It will not happen. A ban on rifles is not reasonable, it is class warfare.
It’s also an attack on disabled and women.
It’s not flawed. Your understanding is flawed. You live in fear. Don’t live in fear.
I don’t live in fear. I hope to never have to use my tools, no matter what they are. But just how I need my socket set when my car breaks down, I have my firearms if I need to defend myself or my loved ones.
Hahahaha.
Yet more ignorance.
You could own canons when it was written, and fully automatic weapons already existed.
It was written with exactly the change in tech in mind, and if you had bothered to educate yourself (by reading things like Federalist Papers or the Adams-Jefferson letters) you’d know this. But you’d rather operate from ideology and hubris.
This is such a clown argument. Canons cannot be used to kill 60 people and wound more than 400 from a hotel room in Las Vegas. Get real!
Hahahahaah. Thanks for the chuckle!
Define military style
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Semi-automatic and automatic.
Automatic is defacto illegal unless you go through a very lengthy process whereby you register yourself and your weapon and pay money directly to the ATF. Only very few individuals own automatics for this reason.
Literally every modern handgun and rifle is semi automatic, save for skeet shooting break-action shotguns and some revolvers.
AR-15s are functionally the same as the majority of rifles, they’re semi automatic. Calling AR-15s military style immediately shows you know almost nothing about guns.
We’d have a better return on our investment banning handguns which are used in more deadly non-police shootings by a whole fucking lot.
Yeah, I’d call AR-15s military style. It’s ok if you don’t. No matter what you call them, it’s idiotic that random people run around with them.
Can you define what about them makes you consider them military style?
And what are you thinking of when you say “random people running around with them”, because legally anyone who purchases them is required to pass an FBI background check to make sure they’re not a felon, among other things.
I consider semi-automatic and automatic firearms to be military style.
By “random” I just mean anyone who can pass a background check. The easy access to weapons is what stands out in American society when it comes to gun violence.
I consider semi-automatic and automatic firearms to be military style.
So just to be clear, that’s 99% of guns, and automatic is essentially already out of the equation since nobody makes or sells those anymore because of ATF regulations. Virtually all modern guns are semi automatic.
You do know AR-15s that consumers can buy are already not automatic right?
The difficult problem is the ones who decide to do bad things with guns, don’t exactly have much respect for the law. Pass whatever restrictions you want, if someone wants to shoot anyone badly enough, they will find a way.
But that’s not really a good reason to not have regulations. “People are going to steal your shit if they want to badly enough” does not mean theft shouldn’t be a crime.
Sure, they may find a way, but if it’s harder to find that way, there’s a chance they’ll either change their minds or use a tool that’s less lethal and will kill fewer.
The US has a unique problem in the Western world, and what sticks out is access to weapons.
IMO a more robust mental and other healthcare system and social services would go a lot farther in preventing these kinds of things. Identifying and fixing/containing the people that are so deranged that they would kill others would stop most killings and the kinds of things that lead up to it. Most of the gun crime is a symptom of a much larger problem of people with little to no support lashing out.
You think Americans are just that much more mentally ill than people in every other developed country on earth? Of course not. The one thing that stands out in the US is easy access to weapons.
Yes I do but that’s beside the point. The vast majority of gun owners never do anything criminal with them. It’s people with mental health problems who snap or criminals who’re using them to perpetrate other crimes (many of whom would probably not be criminals if they had proper social support.
Countries with strict gun control haven’t solved the root of the problem. People can still be dangerous without guns and if we can’t trust someone to own a gun we really shouldn’t trust them to have free reign to interact with society without supervision either.
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Every gun shoots lead all the same. It doesn’t matter what “style” it is.
So it shouldn’t matter if people are only allowed to own black powder muskets then, right?
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I though we were switching over to environmentally friendly tungsten?
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Every gun shoots lead all the same. It doesn’t matter what “style” it is.
Then banning some of them should pose no problem for gun enthusiasts.
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Some weapons, including AR-15s, are specifically designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. Makes a big difference.
Wait, who’s talking about banning guns? Nobody in the thread has mentioned it and I did try to read all the comments. I even did a quick ctrl+f for keywords just to make sure and found nothing.
Look up
Where exactly? If that comment isn’t older than my comment or comes as a result of the person I was replying to planting the seed I’m probably gonna block you
Lol alright bro, please do it.
So where exactly?
You sure you read the comments? Lmao.
“After months of research, we have written a 1000 page report proving the solution is fewer guns.”
Republicans: “MORE GUNS! ARM EVERYONE!”
From the WaPo article:
The new office will report up through Stefanie Feldman, the White House staff secretary and a longtime Biden policy aide who has worked on the firearms issue for years, the people said. Feldman previously worked on the Domestic Policy Council and still oversees the gun policy portfolio at the White House.
So it’s going to be a purely policy role within the White House? Well that’s disappointing. I was hoping it was going to be somewhere in HHS, or at least DoJ.
That would likely require explicit funding. Yes this is just to make a headline. He could actually direct the ATF to follow up on straw purchases, improve data sync with NICS and other federal databases if he wanted to do something meaningful.
Great idea, but I do not have faith that this will be well executed.
If the democrats had the same drive as their republican counterparts, this would be a better country.
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The only reason the GOP is as powerful as it is is because the Dems are so fucking terrible at playing the damn game. Pick your battles. Good idea or not - Biden is trying real hard to lose this election.
The biggest single-issue voting blocks in the county are pro-lifers and pro-gun people. Even if most people want stronger gun control and better abortion access, they don’t base the entirety of their votes on those positions. It’s not like Dems or moderates who are anti-gun would vote for Trump or Biden were pro-gun.
The only time being pro gun-control is advantageous is in a primary, which Biden doesn’t have to worry about. In the general election it’s entirely detrimental to a campaign.
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about time
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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).
Its already illegal to murder
Why? Murderers don’t care about the law
So we can charge them and put them away from society. Making a crime more illegaler and increasing the punishment for it doesn’t reduce crime rates.
So we can charge them and put them away from society.
What do you mean? I thought criminals could simply ignore all laws, are you saying it’s possible for laws to have some effect after all?
They can ignore them and still murder yes. It happens in the 10s of thousands per year in the US alone. Once you’re caught the law lets society punish these individuals, but the law didn’t pervent the murder. Ergo making it double illegal won’t help.
Okay okay.
So. Instead of inserting layers of metaphors and renaming a gun ban to “making murder double illegal”, what if we just called it what it is, “making gun ownership illegal”
You are taking it for granted that it will always definitely be okay to own a gun as long as you don’t commit a crime with it. What we are discussing currently is whether ownership should be a crime in and of itself. On the most fundamental level, do you think a law directly targeting gun ownership could possibly have any effect?
And before this turns into a whole thing, it may come as a shock for you to learn that I do not personally support such a ban. The article you listed says in quite plain language that higher wages and better opportunity is what decrease crime, after all. The only thing I take issue with right now is the ludicrous assertion that the law has no effect on “criminals” because they will simply break the law.
I can guarantee you a gun ban would reduce the number of guns, and the strategy of trying to gaslight people into believing it wouldn’t is fundamentally ineffective. If you support ownership then you should want to nip these arguments in the bud as well, as they’re only going to backfire
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 why we already have federal background checks required for all retail purchases of guns. Requiring those for private sales is basically impossible to enforce since anyone can sell anything they want in private as long as they don’t create a record of it.
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Please show me examples of criminals following the law… I’ll wait
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Ok, now you’re starting to get the point. If I criminal wanted to rob a store or invade someone’s home, what’s stopping them from using a gun? They certainly won’t stop using one because it just happens to be illegal.
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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.
Exactly. Didn’t that one kid in that one shooting walk into the shop and ask for tons of ammo and nobody asked questions before cashing him out? I forget which shooting that was, but I could almost bet that applies to more than one school shooter at this point.
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.
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
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