“Do something. Do something big,” Joe Biden implored during a speech in California Tuesday, March 14, after signing an executive order he claims will make communities safer. “I’m determined to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” he declared in the Los Angeles community where a gunman killed 11 people in a dance hall in January. That, however, his latest executive action will not do. Nor does it accomplish much of anything one might consider “something big,” as unilaterally creating sweeping gun control is simply outside his remit.
Biden’s Executive Order – Virtue Signaling at Its Best
President Biden’s “Executive Order on Reducing Gun Violence and Making Our Communities Safer” commits a good deal of its 1,200-plus words to lamenting gun violence and promising a “whole-of-government” response to combat it. But the power for the nation’s commander-in-chief to change anything beyond how his own executive departments and agencies behave is quite limited – and with good reason. While many Democrats might today mourn for the power the president never had, they were glad of the checks and balances when Trump held the office.
The authority to dictate executive policy is no small matter, however, as we’ve seen recently with the latest pistol brace ruling from the ATF. To be sure, there were plenty of directives for various department and agency heads to submit reports, expand federal campaigns, and develop proposals – to steal a few calls to action from the executive order itself.
The document does, of course, devote some space to boasting about the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed last year. As an actual act of Congress signed by the president, this does, in fact, affect real change. Biden directs the various department and agency heads to operate according to the new law, and implores Congress to “take additional action.”
America’s Latest Gun Control
As Liberty Nation reported in June of last year, the bill was a compromise. Anti-gun Democrats wanted to raise the firearm purchase age to 21, clear a national red-flag law, and allow mental health records to be treated like criminal histories. What they got, however, was an “enhanced” background check, which still lets people buy firearms at 18, but opens up school and mental health records for anyone under 21. While it doesn’t enforce a national red-flag law, it does make available funds to support individual states to implement their own.
(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The act, which passed easily through the Democrat-controlled house in 2022 after Senate Republicans struck a deal, was a great infringement on the right to keep and bear arms – especially for those under age 21. However, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It didn’t open up medical records in all background checks. It didn’t expand the requirement to do such checks to every firearms purchase, commercial or not, and it didn’t establish a national extreme risk protection system whereby legal gun owners could be disarmed without any real due cause. It also won’t ban so-called assault weapons or high-capacity magazines. He’s still begging Congress for that.
There’s Potential Here …
Biden’s executive order does, however, have the potential to change a few things quite drastically. Clarifying the “definition of who is engaged in the business of dealing in firearms” could, if interpreted broadly enough, become a sort of stand-in for universal background checks. Rather than requiring a check for a private sale, it has the potential to change the meaning so that private sales become commercial.
Also, the president’s executive order calls for expanding existing “federal campaigns and other efforts to promote safe storage of firearms.” Now, in general practice, most gun owners will agree that safely storing a firearm is a good thing. Consider the four rules of firearm safety:
- Treat all guns as if they are always loaded. (Many add “and keep ‘em loaded.”)
- Never let the muzzle point at anything you aren’t willing to destroy.
- Keep your finger (and anything else, for that matter) off the trigger until your sights are on target and you’ve decided to shoot.
- Be sure of your target and what’s behind it.
While a firearm is locked away, it’s safe; at least the middle two rules are followed by default. Very rarely does a gun go off without something touching the trigger. However, safe storage requirements impose additional burdens on both consumers and retailers. They can also, depending on how strict they are, make it very unlikely someone has quick enough access to a home-defense weapon to actually matter during a violent attack.
Biden’s executive order may, for the most part, be a simple case of virtue signaling to the anti-gun left, reminding them their president hasn’t abandoned his crusade against the rights of legally armed citizens. But – to quote the late Herman Cain – the devil is in the details. Will the administration redefine the Second Amendment yet again, or is it all just so much hot air?
