President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are scheduled to make a rare joint appearance at the White House today to speak about their administration’s efforts to reduce gun violence and to announce new executive orders to improve school active shooter training and address new firearms technology.
Thursday’s event marked one year since the creation of the White House’s first-ever Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which Harris will oversee, and came as guns have emerged as a divisive issue in the campaign, even as the Biden administration sought to highlight recent FBI data showing a decline in violent crime under Biden.
During the presidential debate in Philadelphia earlier this month, Trump accused Harris of saying she wanted to “confiscate guns,” but Harris responded by saying she is a gun owner and that neither she nor Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are “taking away anybody’s guns.”
According to administration officials, the executive order that President Biden will sign on Thursday will direct the newly formed Firearms Threat Task Force to evaluate the risks posed by “machine gun conversion devices” that turn ordinary semi-automatic pistols into fully automatic rifles, as well as printed rifles without serialized numbers that can be 3-D printed from computer code available online.
The report also calls on Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in consultation with the Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice and the Surgeon General, to issue guidelines on active shooter drills for schools to address what officials say is “very limited research on how to design and deploy these drills to maximize their effectiveness and minimize the collateral damage they may cause.”
