NRA-ILA | Biden-Harris Administration Caps a Year of Executive Gun Control With … More of the Same

Last week, the Biden-Harris administration celebrated the one-year anniversary of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. As we explained when the office was launched, this effort funnels taxpayer funds to career firearm prohibition activists.  Their job is to create an anti-gun culture within all branches of the federal bureaucracy and to dream up ever more ways to suppress Second Amendment rights. Overseeing this effort is none other than the Democrats’ party-appointed presidential candidate, and current vice president, Kamala Harris. The administration’s celebration included a “Year One Progress Report” detailing the office’s efforts over the past twelve months. And, because gun control only begets more gun control, the festivities were capped by the announcement of yet another round of executive actions by the Biden-Harris administration to demonize pro-gun America.  

The 12-page progress report indicates the office has been quite busy during its debut year. While there is the usual fluff inherent in any self-congratulatory government exercise, there is also ample indication the administration is committed to using the office to leverage a “whole of government” approach to Second Amendment suppression. 

One of the more substantive functions of the office has been to require accountability of other components of the bureaucracy for implementation of the misnamed Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), a sprawling package of anti-gun legislation that Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. That act was sold to the American public and its moderate supporters as a response to high-profile mass shootings that have captured headlines over the past several years. Yet little of its content was even arguably relevant to that phenomenon, which itself is the rarest category of firearm-related mortality in the U.S. Instead, its main provisions focused on longstanding and generic items of the anti-gun agenda, including expanding groups categorically prohibited from possessing guns, promoting state firearm seizure laws, and giving the government ever more leverage over the lawful firearms industry.

Among the administration’s most radical steps to implement the BSCA was a far-reaching administrative rule released in April to ban various categories of personal firearms transfers between law-abiding people for lawful purposes. The administration openly bragged that it was going as far as possible in direction of “universal background checks” for firearm sales. Yet even some of the BSCA’s main supporters countered that such a rule was well beyond anything contemplated by the act. The rule itself has been mired in legal challenges ever since its publication, but it remains a monument to how broadly and aggressively the Biden-Harris administration will interpret and leverage any authority to persecute America’s gun culture.

Another project of Harris’s anti-gun office has been promoting “red flag” firearm seizure laws within the states, both by highlighting provisions within the BSCA that can fund such efforts and by creating a “clearinghouse” within the Department of Justice to encourage states’ use of the policy. Left behind in these efforts are provisions of the BSCA that supposedly ensure a minimum of due process for the implementation of these laws. As we have reported, non-conforming laws have received federal funds under the BSCA, and multiple states continue to issue “ex parte” red flag orders that authorize firearm seizures before the affected individuals have even been made aware of the allegations against them. 

The office also noted “progress” in leveraging the vast scope and reach of the U.S. government to spread more or less subtle anti-gun messages throughout the bureaucracy and to amplify these themes with various “state and local partners.” Chief among these is the administration’s emphasis on what it calls “safe firearm storage.” This seemingly harmless catchphrase is actually rooted in a culture that considers the presence of a lawfully possessed firearm within a home as a per se danger to occupants and visitors of the residence. The safest course of action, under this way of thinking, is simply to forgo firearm ownership entirely. Short of that, however, gun owners are encouraged to always keep their firearms in an unusable state. Only when the gun is actually being used – for example, at a shooting range or while hunting – should it be operable or loaded.

The “safe storage” mentality also promotes the idea that firearm ownership is especially ill-advised for an ever-growing list of “high risk” groups. These include households with children, teens, elderly people, combat veterans, people being treated for various ailments, or those who use alcohol or drugs, whether lawfully prescribed or otherwise. Caregivers, visitors, and the families of children’s playmates are all encouraged to interrogate their clients, relatives, and friends about the presence of firearms within private homes.

There is obviously nothing wrong with prudent firearm storage. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that the Second Amendment includes the right to keep “any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.” That decision invalidated the District of Columbia’s requirements that all firearms in the home be kept unloaded, dissembled, or otherwise unusable. What constitutes prudence in resolving the balance between accessibility and security is therefore a decision that must be left in the hands of the gun owner. To be sure, grossly irresponsible behavior that leads to bad outcomes can still be held accountable after the fact. But the government cannot require, across the board, that guns be useless for “immediate self-defense.”

Using the rubric of “safe storage,” however, allows anti-gun activists to undermine the very purpose for which most people own guns and the one the Supreme Court considers the “core” of the right: self-defense. It emphasizes ritualized, one-size-fits-all solutions that benefit prowlers and home invaders over would-be defenders of home and family. And the Biden-Harris administration is promoting this paradigm throughout the federal government, as well as in schools, with healthcare providers, and with veterans’ groups.

Of course, Kamala Harris herself sees an even blunter role for “safe firearm storage,” as we noted last week. Recently resurfaced video shows her opining that a “safe storage” mandate enacted by San Francisco in 2007 empowered city officials to violate the “sanctity” of a “locked home” to ensure lawful gun owners were in compliance with the city’s firearm storage requirements. This interpretation, however, violates clearly established Fourth Amendment protections, to say nothing of the Second Amendment. As if that weren’t enough, gun control activists within the Michigan legislature just last week amended a bipartisan school funding bill to include an appropriation for an anonymous “tip line” so students could report “unsafe” firearm storage within private homes. These violations of basic civil liberties, and worse, are the natural outgrowth of the state presuming to dictate what goes on in the homes of those who dare to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

Another item listed in the office’s “accomplishments” was using the government’s military firearm procurement process to restrict the public’s access to certain firearm-related technology.  It noted that in response to a presidential directive, the Department of Defense as of May 2024 “began requiring that, in planning acquisitions to develop new firearm technology, Department officials are to consider placing limitations on the future commercial sales of such newly-developed custom technology covered by the contract.” Of course, firearm technology has flowed freely between the private and public sectors throughout the country’s history, as have other types of technology, including in medicine, communications, clothing, and nutrition. Normalizing the counter-factual idea that “military” and “civilian” guns must be qualitatively different and segregated is part and parcel of the anti-gun movement’s long-term strategy. So, too, is influence over the private sector to accomplish objectives and impose mandates that the Constitution prevents the government from requiring directly.

The report also crowed about partnerships with influential institutions and individuals to promote the administration’s anti-gun agenda, including celebrities, faith leaders, educators, healthcare providers, and entertainers. And, as we have already reported on separately, the report celebrated the surgeon general’s declaration of “gun violence” as “public health crisis.” Clearly, creating a gun-averse culture is seen as one of the most important objectives for the firearm prohibition movement. To this end, the report additionally noted “progress” in creating clones of the White House’s anti-gun office in the executive branches of 12 states.

But the administration did more than just publish propaganda designed to make it appear proactive and effectual in promoting its anti-gun agenda. It imposed even more executive actions aimed at portraying gun ownership as a societal ill.  

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris announced these measures last Thursday during a ceremony in which the vice president claimed “the right to be safe is a civil right”, as is the “right … to live … without fear of violence, including gun violence.” This statement underscores the false promise of gun control: superficially appealing; useless in practice; and contrary to American law and history, in which rights function mainly to restrain illegitimate government action, rather than “guarantee” outcomes the government cannot deliver. This was followed by other nonsense, including Joe Biden’s bizarre claim that he has “been to all but three mass shootings in — in the United States of America” (which conflicts with his other claim there are more such shootings than “days in the year”), as well as yet another variation on his oft-told fable about confronting a hunter with the news that deer don’t wear Kevlar. 

Fortunately, the orders themselves were in this case long on election year rhetoric and short on substance. One created an interagency task force to study and report on strategies to “stop the proliferation of machinegun conversion devices,” and to “address the emerging threat related to 3D printed firearms”. Yet another interagency working group was tasked with developing and publishing “information about school-based active-shooter drills for schools,” and in particular how to ensure the drills themselves do not cause students trauma or other negative collateral consequences.

Despite Harris’s rhetoric about the right to be and feel safe, the orders included a disclaimer that they were “not intended to, and [do] not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.” In other words, if the government ignores its own orders, it can’t be held to them.

That, perhaps, is the best summation of the whole affair. Gun control promises much but doesn’t deliver. And if it should disappoint you, take heart. There’s always more gun control where that came from.