SAN DIEGO, California – President Joe Biden signed an executive order Tuesday to increase the number of background checks for firearms purchases, promote safer and better gun storage, and ensure that the nation’s law enforcement agencies take full advantage of a bipartisan gun control law signed into law last summer.
The Democratic president was later preparing to give a speech on gun control from Monterey Park in California.
In January, a gunman stormed a dance hall in this community near Los Angeles and shot 20 people, fatally shooting 11, after a Lunar New Year celebration.
Biden’s rhetoric has only grown louder around guns: He routinely calls for banning so-called assault weapons in his speeches, and Democrats didn’t push such a vociferous anti-gun platform even during Barack Obama’s presidency, when Biden he was vice president.
Biden, however, has grown more confident since the November midterms, after his usual comments about the need for gun control failed to result in massive vote losses. The president is expected to continue to push for strong changes as he moves toward the 2024 election, his aides say.
Biden invited Brandon Tsay, the 26-year-old who seized the semi-automatic pistol from the shooter in Monterey Park, to his State of the Union address.
“He saved lives. It’s time we do the same, too,” Biden said, praising Tsay’s heroism in his address to Congress. “Let’s ban assault weapons once and for all.”
However, the president’s power is limited to trying to go beyond bipartisan legislation passed by Congress last summer: the most sweeping gun violence bill in decades. It followed the murders last year of 19 students and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school and 10 people at a Buffalo, New York grocery store.