President Biden campaigned on promises of sweeping gun reform. Some of his proposals never materialized, but his administration will leave initiatives meant to aid law enforcement, prevent shootings, and crack down on rogue gun sellers and traffickers, The Trace reports. “It’s clear that Biden has been by far the strongest gun safety president in American history,” said Emma Brown of the gun violence prevention group Giffords. President-elect Trump has vowed to nix many of his predecessor’s initiatives. Advocates hope that the national concern over gun violence will force him to shy away from dismantling much of Biden’s legacy.
“People are just tired of these mass shootings,” said Steve Lindley of Brady United. “The problem is not going away. The statistics are what the statistics are.”
Biden took office with violent crime and gun sales surging during the pandemic. Less than two months after he took office, the House passed bills to expand background checks to all gun sales and extend the deadline for the FBI to vet prospective gun buyers. The legislation stalled in the Senate. “Biden certainly fell short of where he wanted to be on policy terms with gun violence,” said Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York in Cortland. “But he did remarkably well given the constraints and limitations he faced.” With Congress gridlocked, the president in 2021 issued executive actions intended to curb the use of guns in crime. He ordered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to propose rules restricting the availability of pistol braces as well as kits for making homemade, untraceable “ghost guns.” He nominated David Chipman — a former ATF agent — to be the agency’s first permanent director in six years. An investigation by The Trace and USA Today found that the ATF had routinely allowed gun dealers to stay in business even after committing violations that could have armed criminals. Biden directed the agency to revoke the licenses of gun dealers who willfully commit violations like transferring firearms to convicted felons and failing to run background checks on customers. The zero-tolerance policy caused revocations to soar. Chipman wanted to make the ATF more consistent in policing gun dealers and more proactive in fighting gun crime in general, but by the summer of 2021, it was becoming clear that his nomination was going to fail.
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