President Joe Biden will announce the creation of the first-ever federal office of gun violence prevention on Friday, fulfilling a key demand of gun safety activists as legislation remains stalled in Congress, according to two people with direct knowledge of the White House’s plans.

Stefanie Feldman, a longtime Biden aide who previously worked on the Domestic Policy Council, will play a leading role, the people said.

Greg Jackson, executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, and Rob Wilcox, the senior director for federal government affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety, are expected to hold key roles in the office alongside Feldman, who has worked on gun policy for more than a decade and still oversees the policy portfolio at the White House. The creation of the office was first reported by The Washington Post.

    • @Carnelian@lemmy.world
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      289 months ago

      Pedophiles don’t care about the law either it seems, so would you say we should just get rid of all laws pertaining to that?

      • @sudo22@lemmy.world
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        -119 months ago

        Its already illegal to murder, so adding additional crimes to gun possetion is essentially a proxy for making murder double illegal. If a criminal doesn’t care about murder laws, possession laws aren’t going to bother them.

        Your metaphor would be more like saying: pedophilia is already illegal, make giving candy to children who aren’t yours with intent to abduct illegal too. Essentially make pedophilia double illegal (in this instance).

            • @Carnelian@lemmy.world
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              99 months ago

              So we can charge them and put them away from society.

              What do you mean? I thought criminals could simply ignore all laws, are you saying it’s possible for laws to have some effect after all?

              • @sudo22@lemmy.world
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                -29 months ago

                They can ignore them and still murder yes. It happens in the 10s of thousands per year in the US alone. Once you’re caught the law lets society punish these individuals, but the law didn’t pervent the murder. Ergo making it double illegal won’t help.

                • @Carnelian@lemmy.world
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                  59 months ago

                  Okay okay.

                  So. Instead of inserting layers of metaphors and renaming a gun ban to “making murder double illegal”, what if we just called it what it is, “making gun ownership illegal”

                  You are taking it for granted that it will always definitely be okay to own a gun as long as you don’t commit a crime with it. What we are discussing currently is whether ownership should be a crime in and of itself. On the most fundamental level, do you think a law directly targeting gun ownership could possibly have any effect?

                  And before this turns into a whole thing, it may come as a shock for you to learn that I do not personally support such a ban. The article you listed says in quite plain language that higher wages and better opportunity is what decrease crime, after all. The only thing I take issue with right now is the ludicrous assertion that the law has no effect on “criminals” because they will simply break the law.

                  I can guarantee you a gun ban would reduce the number of guns, and the strategy of trying to gaslight people into believing it wouldn’t is fundamentally ineffective. If you support ownership then you should want to nip these arguments in the bud as well, as they’re only going to backfire

                  • @sudo22@lemmy.world
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                    29 months ago

                    Oh no I was never thinking of a gun ban as the metaphor, my apologies if that’s what came across. I was more so thinking along the lines of what politicians are doing to law abiding gun owners in NM recently (prior to the court restraint). That’s more so what I was calling making murder double illegal and being a useless decree.

    • HeartyBeast
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      139 months ago

      heres the thing though - criminals arent known for caring about laws or federal offices

      Here’s the thing though - putting basic steps in place to make it more difficult for criminals to get a gun isn;t a bad idea.

      • @RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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        39 months ago

        That’s why we already have federal background checks required for all retail purchases of guns. Requiring those for private sales is basically impossible to enforce since anyone can sell anything they want in private as long as they don’t create a record of it.

    • Silverseren
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      -39 months ago

      That’s just blatantly false. Actual scientific study on gun violence has found that gun restrictions, such as the assault weapons ban, had meaningful reductions in gun crime in the years following its implementation.

      Most guns used in crimes are obtained legally.

      • Lemminary
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        -19 months ago

        Exactly. Didn’t that one kid in that one shooting walk into the shop and ask for tons of ammo and nobody asked questions before cashing him out? I forget which shooting that was, but I could almost bet that applies to more than one school shooter at this point.

    • @shalafi@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      If the Dems would drop their anti-gun fight, they would win every election in a landslide and we wouldn’t have the ridiculous government we have now.

      EDIT: Lemmy and guns in a nutshell right here.

      https://imgur.com/a/pR7CuLA

      • @Lightborne@lemmy.world
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        339 months ago

        If Americans would stop fetishizing guns to the point of sacrificing children to the altar of their bang-bang toys, we could actually have a respectable society.

        • @shalafi@lemmy.world
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          -39 months ago

          CDC counts gun and vehicular deaths at about the same, year in and out. Thing is, I can avoid suicide (43% or so), bad people and places. I cannot avoid random people killing me on a stroll or a drive.

          Where’s your passion for dealing with death on the road? Because guns don’t scare me a bit. Driving does.

        • @bobman@unilem.org
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          -189 months ago

          Nah. I’ve thought about this.

          If they couldn’t use guns, they’d use cars. If they can’t use cars, they’d focus on torture. i.e. instead of trying to kill as many people as possible, just try to make whoever you catch suffer as much as possible before pulling the plug.

          These are all band-aids to avoid addressing the real problem: those who feel they have nothing to live for so they take their anger out on society.

          The solution to the problem is reducing the disparity in wealth. It won’t eliminate all of them, but it will severely reduce them. This is why nobody is talking about it. The ruling class has been successful, again, in getting us to squabble over bullshit to avoid addressing the real issue, which is always the money.

          • @shalafi@lemmy.world
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            29 months ago

            School shooting started because of exactly one reason: Columbine. If those monsters had got their pipe bomb working, that would be the weapon of choice.

            There were plenty of weapons in circulation before Columbine, and school shooting were not a thing. I’m 52, I remember.

            • @bobman@unilem.org
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              -19 months ago

              Bombs are not people’s weapons of choice because they require some knowledge to build and pose a substantial risk to the amateur builder.

          • SeaJ
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            29 months ago

            If they couldn’t use guns, they’d use cars. If they can’t use cars, they’d focus on torture. i.e. instead of trying to kill as many people as possible, just try to make whoever you catch suffer as much as possible before pulling the plug.

            Cars are quite a bit slower and a hell of a lot more obvious than a gun. They might switch to that (they have not in other countries) but that would still certainly result in fewer deaths overall. Not sure why they would possibly switch to torture. That one does not seem to have any basis in reality.

            You are correct that wealth disparity is one of the big parts of the puzzle. The other big party of the puzzle is how easy it is to get a gun due to how many there are floating around. Things like straw purchases being rampant means that it is pretty easy to obtain an illegal gun. Gun registration would help a bit with that as well as something like requiring a current gun permit to purchase new guns.

            • @bobman@unilem.org
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              9 months ago

              They might switch to that (they have not in other countries)

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_van_attack

              Not sure why they would possibly switch to torture.

              Because if they can’t kill a lot of people but still want to cause as much harm as possible, torturing is the next best option. That’s how terrorism works. If you’re innocent to the world you live in, this might not make sense.

              • SeaJ
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                9 months ago

                Let me know when any other country has as many car attacks per capita as there are shootings per capita in the US. I’ll wait. Cherry picking one incident means jack shit.

                Most shootings are not to inflict the most damage. There is no more torture in countries with stricter gun laws than there is here in the US. If you have some evidence that there is, feel free to share it but until then all you have is ridiculous scare mongering horse shit.

      • HeartyBeast
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        49 months ago

        “It’s worth the dead children to get elected” isn’t the best of campaign slogans