President Joe Biden speaks to a conference hosted by Everytown for Gun Safety in Washington on June 11, 2024. Screenshot from CSPAN livestream
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Tuesday touted his administration’s efforts to reduce gun violence as the second anniversary of bipartisan gun safety legislation he signed into law approaches.
“Never give up on hope,” Biden said during an annual conference hosted by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
The speech came hours after the president’s son Hunter Biden was found guilty in a federal court in Delaware of lying on paperwork related to purchasing a gun and unlawfully possessing that gun, according to media reports.
The federal jury found Hunter Biden, who has struggled with drug addiction, guilty on three related felony charges: lying to a licensed gun dealer, falsely stating on an application for a gun that he was not using drugs and for unlawfully having the gun for 11 days.
He could face up to 25 years in prison, though as a first-time offender his sentence is expected to be much less severe.
The president has avoided publicly commenting on his son’s case and he did not mention the verdict in his speech.
Gaza protest
Shortly after Biden began his speech, he was interrupted by a protester who accused the president of being “complicit” in the high death toll of the Israel-Hamas war that has killed 35,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, according to the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip run by the Hamas-controlled government. An agreement over a U.S. backed cease-fire deal remains elusive.
The crowd immediately drowned out the protester. A group of protesters was removed, according to a White House pool report.
Biden tried to calm the crowd.
“That’s alright,” he said. “Folks, it’s ok, look they care, innocent children have been lost, they make a point.”
Law nears second anniversary
Biden went back to his speech, and thanked the gun safety advocates and survivors “who have turned their pain” into advocacy.
“You’ve helped power a movement,” Biden said.
The gun safety law Biden signed in 2022 was the most comprehensive federal gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years. It stemmed from two deadly mass shootings less than two weeks apart in 2022.
One was at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered, making it the second-deadliest mass shooting since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012.
The other was in Buffalo, New York, where a white supremacist targeted a Black neighborhood and killed 10 Black people in a grocery store.
The 2022 law provided $750 million for states to enact “red flag laws,” which allow the courts to temporarily remove a firearm from an individual who is a threat to themselves or others as well as $11 billion in mental health services for schools and families. The law cracked down on straw purchases, illegal transactions in which a buyer acquires a gun for someone else.
The bill also requires those who are under 21 and want to purchase a firearm to undergo a background check that takes into account a review of juvenile and mental health records. It also led to the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
The Justice Department also announced Tuesday it has charged more than 500 people under provisions of the gun safety law to “target the unlawful trafficking and straw-purchasing of firearms.”
The statutes “directly prohibit straw purchasing and firearms trafficking and significantly enhance the penalties for those crimes, providing for up to 15 years in prison,” according to the Justice Department.
“Criminals rely on illegal gun traffickers and straw purchasers to obtain the weapons they use to harm our communities,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
More work to do
Biden acknowledged that more needs to be done on gun safety legislation and he called on Congress to ban assault weapons and require universal background checks and safe storage of firearms. In a divided Congress, any gun-related legislation is unlikely to pass.
The last time Congress passed major gun legislation was 1994, when then-President Bill Clinton signed a ban on assault weapons that spanned 10 years. When it expired, Congress did not renew the ban.
Biden also took a jab at his rival, former President Donald J. Trump, and said that he won’t tell people to “get over” a mass shooting.
After a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee said during a campaign speech in Sioux City, Iowa, that while the school shooting that left two dead – an 11-year-old student and the principal – was a “terrible thing that happened,” his advice was to “get over it. We have to move forward.”
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