Joe Biden and Kamala Harris announced new executive actions Thursday to address gun violence, an election-year move that builds on the president’s legacy on the issue and offers Harris another opportunity to assert her leadership as vice president.
During a meeting at the White House on Thursday, Biden is expected to sign an executive order designed to address the trauma inflicted on children by active shooter drills in schools and the threat of machine gun conversion devices, small, 3D-printable devices that can convert a handgun into a fully automatic weapon. The actions come on the one-year anniversary of Biden’s creation of the first-ever Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which he launched in part to identify additional ways to address gun violence from the executive branch without involving Congress.
The joint appearance by Biden and Harris, one of the few since the president turned over his re-election campaign to her in July, will highlight Harris’ role overseeing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. It also gives her a chance to lend her leadership on an issue in her official capacity as vice president while touting her new policies on the campaign trail.
It’s also a legacy-building exercise for Biden, likely his final steps in what has been a top White House priority: from passing the first gun legislation in 30 years to issuing more executive actions on the issue than any previous administration.
The event is the culmination of a week of White House efforts to highlight the office’s work. The White House released a report earlier this week on the office’s official anniversary, highlighting the administration’s actions — including that under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, enhanced background checks have blocked thousands of gun sales to people under 21 and to people convicted of domestic violence crimes. The White House also touted the drop in violent crime — which Biden is also expected to highlight Thursday — after the FBI reported that homicides fell 11.6 percent nationwide in 2023 and that violent crime overall fell 3 percent after spiking during the pandemic.
Federal departments and agencies will also announce a series of additional executive actions, including some related to the implementation of bipartisan gun legislation that Congress passed in June 2022 following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Other actions will focus on safe storage of firearms, implementation of red flag laws, funding for community violence intervention programs and improvements to the background check system, among other steps.
The president’s executive order will create a task force that must issue a report within 90 days to assess the threat posed by unserialized, 3D-printed firearms and machine gun conversion devices. These devices are already illegal under federal law, but law enforcement officials have reported increasingly finding them at crime scenes — and police believe the shooters in the recent shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, used conversion devices.
With regard to school shooting drills, the President directs the Surgeon General and the Secretaries of the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to develop and publish guidelines for schools on how to conduct these drills effectively and minimize unnecessary trauma.
“Schools currently use drills to prepare for their shooter situation, but there is very limited research on how to design and deploy these drills to maximize their effectiveness and minimize any collateral damage they may cause,” Stefanie Feldman, director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, said in a call with reporters ahead of the announcement. “Many parents, students and educators have expressed concerns about the trauma caused by some approaches to these drills.”
Both Biden and Harris will speak on Thursday. Attendees will include survivors, advocates, community violence intervention leaders, law enforcement, mayors and other elected state and local officials. People who have worked with Biden and Harris for decades will also be in attendance, as the White House wanted the event to serve as a kind of tribute to Biden’s efforts on gun violence over the past 30 years. For Harris, there will also be people in attendance who worked with her as a California prosecutor.
