White House launches emergency response protocol for mass shootings
After months of tending to foreign policy conflagrations, sticky inflation numbers and various other pop-up crises, the White House is zeroing back in on a key part of its domestic agenda: gun violence.
A new emergency response team will meet in person for the first time on Friday in the Roosevelt Room, where it will unveil a new protocol for responding to mass shootings and surges in community gun violence, according to plans first shared with POLITICO.
Participating in the initiative led by the White House’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention will be officials from the FBI and the departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, Education, and Housing and Urban Development as well as FEMA, AmeriCorps and the Small Business Administration.
The meeting comes during a time of year when the nation has witnessed some of its worst gun tragedies. Saturday is the 25th anniversary of the Columbine shooting, and, in just a few weeks, it will be two years since the mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket. Soon after that, families in Uvalde, Texas, will mark the second anniversary without their loved ones.
“We know history is a teacher of when we need to be prepared, and when we need to have our resources ready to go to deploy. And so the urgency of the meeting is to ensure that the team, the coordination, and that our approach is in place so that we’re prepared before tragedy strikes,” said Gregory Jackson, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention’s deputy director.
President Joe Biden announced the new guns office last fall after his administration had exhausted the executive actions they could take to address the gun violence epidemic. Biden had already signed historic legislation, 2022’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, as well as more than two dozen orders on guns.
Biden tasked the team with finding new executive actions and implementing the BSCA, which has resulted in the most sweeping expansion of firearms background checks in decades. He also asked the office to coordinate support for survivors, families and communities in the wake of a mass shooting — from emergency trauma care and mental health support to federal assistance for businesses and schools — in the same way FEMA responds to natural disasters.
It was Jackson’s job to create this first-ever federal protocol. He’s tested it out in real time, coordinating across agencies after shootings in Maine, Chicago and Kansas City.
In the immediate aftermath, the Department of Justice will deploy law enforcement and FBI victim services, as it previously has. The new White House team will now also jump into action, calling mayors, local legislators and governors to map out victim needs.
Jackson will then convene an emergency call with federal agencies to figure out which resources are available and how quickly they can deploy them. Sometimes he’ll fly out to the scene to offer extra support on the ground, serving as the primary contact so local officials don’t have to worry about keeping track of a web of federal agencies.
“A lot of the resources are now synced up together, and we’re just able to move a lot faster to support communities,” Jackson said. “What would’ve taken weeks to do, we’re now able to do within hours or days.”
In Lewiston, Maine, for instance, the administration helped set up a family and victim assistance center. Because Lewiston has a large deaf community, they made sure there were sign language interpreters present. There was a similar effort after the Kansas City shooting to ensure resources were targeted to the sizable Latino community.
Jackson, who nearly died after he was shot as an innocent bystander in D.C. 10 years ago, has also drawn on his own experience as a gun violence survivor and as an advocate leading the Community Justice Action Fund. Listening to the communities amid an emergency response is one thing, he learned over the last few months, but hearing from local officials, families and activists who have survived past tragedies can be even more helpful.
To that end, the White House has held listening sessions in recent months with community members from Buffalo, Uvalde, Parkland, Florida, Highland Park, Illinois, and other mass shooting sites, as well as people affected by gun violence events that haven’t garnered the same level of media attention — such as Baltimore’s Brooklyn Homes, where 28 teens were shot in 2023.
Jackson and his team learned that in Buffalo, for instance, there was unique trauma among seniors and grocery store clerks who were expected to return to work just days after 10 people were killed in their store. In Baltimore, teens needed extra support that local groups weren’t equipped to provide. And in the Newtown, Connecticut, tragedy, Sandy Hook Elementary teachers were sent back to the classroom without any additional resources to deal with the trauma.
“I think in almost every one of these tragedies, we’ve seen the lack of guidance and support for local leaders, local officials, and local communities,” Jackson said. “And these are all resources that these agencies have at the federal level. They just haven’t all been coordinated.”
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