In layman’s terms: This report documents how the federal government is spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money to infringe on the rights of law-abiding Americans, but not doing a single thing to hold criminals accountable for crime!
In September the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention released its first annual report. The report is an astounding admission documenting numerous Unconstitutional efforts and activities by the federal government to undermine the Second Amendment.
President Biden established the Office on September 22, of 2023 (its genesis was in the so-called “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act”) and appointed Vice President Harris to oversee the new office.
In announcing the new office, the White House laid out its basic goals (emphasis ours):
- Banning commonly owned firearms
- Requiring illegal “storage” of firearms in the home
- Ending private sale of firearms
- Eliminating gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability
- Enacting the “Safer America Plan”, which would put more police officers on our streets for accountable, community policing and invest in gun violence prevention and intervention.
The report fails to define a basic term that is used throughout and as the basis for its initiatives: “gun violence” is presumably some sort of special kind of crime, but is nowhere defined. Murder, manslaughter, assault, arson, grand larceny, possession and many other crimes are already well-defined under our penal code, but “gun violence” is not a crime, per se.
However, the obvious implication is that inanimate objects are somehow responsible for a special subset of crime, which is an effort to steer a narrative that underpins their ultimate agenda which is to disarm law-abiding Americans.
The report starts with a gross mischaracterization (some might say lie) that is intended to frame the White House efforts as “successful”:
On June 25, 2022, President Biden signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act—the most significant gun violence prevention law in nearly 30 years. Year-over-year comparison shows that 2023 likely had the single largest homicide rate drop in recent history.
Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., who heads the Crime Prevention Research Center, recently debunked these assertions:
The newly released FBI data shows that reported violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) fell by 3.5% in 2023, but they have revised the 2022 data to show a 4.5% increase. However, it should be compared to the Bureau of Justice Statistics data, which showed a 4.1% increase in reported serious violent crime in 2023 …
What do these percentage changes mean in terms of the number of crimes?
A net increase of 80,029 more violent crimes, 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, violent crime in America has INCREASED and they are hiding these trends with false data.
The White House report details a number of initiatives, but here are some of the most notable, in our opinion, in so far as they are Unconstitutional.
Implementing State Red Flag Laws
Under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) the White House granted $750 million for states to implement what they are calling “crisis intervention” solutions, including red flag laws.
By their own admission, in March of 2024, “only six states had accessed BSCA’s crisis intervention funding for the purpose of implementing red flag laws,” and as of the date of the report, “15 states are now already using or planning to use BSCA’s crisis intervention funding to increase effective use of red flag laws.”
As we’ve previously reported, red flag laws are increasingly being used and abused to circumvent the normal legal requirements to obtain a search warrant, and in the most severe cases, are being weaponized by the government against citizens to disarm them while completely circumventing their due process rights under the 4th Amendment.
Youth Mental Health “Investments”
Another bizarre effort by the administration is identified under the guise of “mental health” with hefty BSCA funding earmarked in the amount of $1 billion, with $285 million released in 2024, “to support efforts to hire and train 14,000 mental health professionals in schools over five years.” In a tacitly racist admission, the report details that, “the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and Department of Education convened leaders from Historically Black Colleges and Universities across the country to increase awareness about the availability of this new funding.”
There’s no explanation for why the funding for youth “mental health” efforts was specifically targeted at blacks.
Community Investments
BSCA is throwing VAST amounts of money and investments into programs that are very loosely defined. According to the report, “on September 28, 2023, the Department of Justice announced it was awarding over $4.4 billion to support community safety, with a significant portion of that funding coming from BSCA. These awards included more than $90 million for community violence interventions, over $150 million for school safety, and $140 million to strengthen the federal gun background check system.”
Notably, none of the school safety funding has been identified to include uniformed and armed school resource officers. Schools are often the target of mass shooters because they are known soft targets where teachers are disarmed.
Trying to find details about what these investments are supporting is difficult to say the least. The cited Department of Justice memo states that its objectives with these funds includes nebulous goals such as:
- delivering treatment and services to those at-risk of justice system involvement
- help people safely and successfully transition from confinement back to their communities
- steer young people away from justice system contact
- help justice system professionals meet community safety challenges
- grants will support innovative and evidence-based strategies designed to prevent and reduce violent crime
- expand access to services among historically underserved and marginalized communities, reduce counterproductive involvement in the justice system
- supporting developmentally appropriate and culturally responsive interventions for youth
- investing in programs that provide trauma-informed and culturally responsive services to victims
When read in context of the administration’s other policies, the program reads like a DEI initiative on steroids.
Notably absent from the entire report, initiative, and general philosophy is holding criminals accountable for crime!
Instead, nearly every stated goal somehow impinges on the freedoms of law-abiding gun owners. That includes:
- Requiring law-abiding gun owners to lock up their firearms in their homes
- Ending the ability for Americans to manufacture their own firearms, which has both cultural and legal precedent in our country’s history
- Stopping the sale of commonly owned firearms to civilians
- Shifting the burden of law enforcement from police officers to unqualified and untrained “community violence intervention organizations”
- Numerous legislative efforts that are being challenged (and overturned) in court
Another worrisome backdoor attack on the Second Amendment includes executive action such as “Declaring Gun Violence a Public Health Crisis”. This has had the effect of inserting the government into the private and confidential relationship between you and your doctor. Many medical providers now ask questions about gun ownership completely unrelated to the reason an individual may be visiting their doctor. This information can be used in the most unscrupulous of ways, including allowing a doctor to “red flag” an individual simply because they own firearms. As some legal experts have advised, DO NOT answer these questions when visiting your doctor. They have no right to know this information.
The report is chock full of other “community action” programs that include working with unelected groups, influencers, medical professionals, impressionable youth and a whole host of groups in an effort to steer a false narrative about America’s gun culture and crime.
Luckily, the initiatives that actually have teeth, in the form of law, are being challenged in court and we are winning, albeit slowly.
The entire report amounts to a lot of smoke and mirrors, full of vague statements, reports of massive spending, and very few solid details.
All you really need to know is that the government is doing everything it can to undermine the Second Amendment.
