Biden issues gun safety executive order, calls for Congress to step up control laws: ‘Do something!’

President Biden on Tuesday issued a gun safety executive order aimed at increasing the enforcement of America’s background check laws, and delivered a plea for federal lawmakers to pass legislation requiring checks for all gun sales.

Biden, who signed a significant bipartisan law expanding background checks last year, has been unable to cajole Congress into taking the far-reaching gun measures he craves. But the White House continues to explore executive avenues to limit America’s intense drumbeat of shootings.

The president’s new order, limited in its scope, directs his cabinet to improve public awareness about the background check law, accelerate law enforcement’s reporting of ballistics data and encourage the use of existing red-flag laws, like one passed in New York.

“This executive order helps keep firearms out of dangerous hands, as I continue to call on Congress to require background checks for all firearm sales,” Biden said in Monterey Park, Calif., the site of a January dance club shooting that left 11 dead.

“It’s just common sense to check whether someone’s a felon or a domestic abuser before they buy a gun,” the president told about 200 people at a Los Angeles-area Boys & Girls Club.

The legislation Biden signed last year, America’s most significant gun control law in three decades, enhanced background checks for buyers between the ages of 18 and 21. Many mass shootings in recent years have been carried out by young men.

The law came after a barrage of devastating shootings, including the racist tragedy in a Buffalo supermarket and the massacre of children in a Uvalde, Texas, school.

But the president has pushed lawmakers to go further, and has demanded a revival of the national assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. “Let’s finish the job — ban assault weapons!” Biden thundered Tuesday in California. “Do something!”

His calls appear likely to go unanswered. Democrats, aiming to renew the assault weapons ban, have long been rebuffed by Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said Tuesday that last year’s law marked “long-overdue” progress. But he called on his colleagues to go further.

“Gun violence remains a devastating sickness that festers deep within the heart of our nation,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “We hope a good number of our Republican colleagues will join us once again.”

In New York, Gov. Hochul signed legislation last June raising the minimum age for semiautomatic weapon purchases and modifying the state’s red-flag statute, which empowers courts to take guns from people deemed to pose possible threats.

The New York law was followed by a marked expansion in use of extreme risk protection orders preventing people from acquiring firearms, according to Hochul’s office. The governor said in a Tuesday statement that Biden’s executive order “brings New York’s approach to a national scale.”

“Too many communities, including my hometown of Buffalo, have been devastated by weapons of war,” Hochul said in the statement. “We have a moral obligation to act.”

Biden and blue-state leaders have been frustrated by the judicial branch’s increasingly expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Last June, the conservative Supreme Court voided a New York State concealed carry handgun law that had stood for a century, ruling that it violated the Second Amendment.

The New York Legislature responded by banning guns in a suite of sensitive locations including subways, schools and Times Square. The ban faces ongoing court challenges.

On Tuesday, Montana’s Republican attorney general, Austin Knudsen, issued a statement declaring that Biden’s new order was “designed to circumvent the legislative process.” He threatened to file a lawsuit opposing its implementation.

But it was not clear if the order would carry far-reaching practical consequences or invite fierce legal challenges.

“It has a lot of words without any orders,” said Andrew Lieb, a Long Island lawyer who has followed the battle over the Second Amendment. “It was a priority statement more than anything else.”

Still, Lieb predicted Biden’s order could push the issue of gun safety toward the forefront of the national conversation.

In a statement, Mayor Adams lavished praise on Biden’s work to combat gun violence, but said “there is only so much we can do through executive orders and law enforcement.”

“The Iron Pipeline dumping deadly weapons onto our streets is a clear and present danger to New Yorkers,” Adams added, “and federal action is needed now to save lives.”

With Denis Slattery and Chris Sommerfeldt