President Joe Biden on Tuesday is expected to announce an executive order aimed at curbing gun violence across a country that has seen a series of high-profile shootings during the first few months of the year.
The White House said in an early Tuesday statement that the president is to announce the executive order in Monterey Park, Calif., a community still in mourning for the 11 people killed and nine others injured by a gunman who opened fire at a dance studio during Lunar New Year festivities on Jan. 21.
The executive order will seek to increase the number of background checks conducted prior to firearms sales by requiring they be performed, moving the nation “as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation,” the White House said.
It is also expected to include measures that will increase the effectiveness of so-called red flag laws, strengthen efforts to hold the gun industry accountable and ramp up the ability of law enforcement to identify and apprehend shooters.
Biden will travel to Monterey Park to visit with families and communities impacted by the mass shooting, one of several to plague the United States this year that has Democrats and gun-control advocates calling from more stringent measures to keep guns out of the hands of would-be shooters.
Vice President Kamal Harris, a former Senator from California, visited the city of some 60,000 people located just outside Los Angeles days after the shooting and called on Congress to pass “reasonable gun safety laws.”
“Can they do something? Yes,” she said. “Should they do something. Yes. Will they do something? That is where we all must speak up, and speak to our elected representatives about what we have a right to expect that they will do in the interest of the safety, the security and the well-being of people like those whose lives were ended here and people around the country.”
According to the White House, the president is also encouraging the Federal Trade Commission to produce a report analyzing how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors and other such marketing practices employed by the industry.
Biden has repeatedly called for gun law reform and campaigned on ushering in such measures, including regulating possession of existing assault weapons and closing loopholes in the federal background check system.
In June, he signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which has been described as the most significant bill directed at curbing gun violence to be enacted in some three decades.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 85 mass shootings so far this year, including 17 in the first two weeks of March.
via gopusa
