Joe Biden vows to tackle ‘grave threat’ of untraceable ‘ghost guns’ – as it happened

The president closed his presentation on gun reform by introducing Steve Dettelbach, a former justice department prosecutor, as his nominee for director of the bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives (ATF) .

It will be Biden’s second attempt at getting a pick through Congress to head the agency after the confirmation of his previous choice, David Chipman, a 25-year ATF veteran, collapsed last year.

“Steve is immensely qualified,” Biden said. “He served the department of justice for two decades. He worked side by side to support the work of federal, state and local law enforcement including ATF agents.

“Steve’s record makes him ready on day one to lead this agency and, by the way, in 2009 the US Senate unanimously confirmed him to serve as US attorney,” Biden added, presumably seeking to steer off any early congressional opposition to his choice for ATF director this time around.

Dettelbach’s confirmation, Biden believes, will be a stride forward in what the president last year branded the US’ “international embarrassment” of gun violence.

Biden was speaking after Mia Tretta, a teenage survivor of a 2019 shooting at Saugus high school in Santa Clarita, California, recounted her experience of seeing two of her closest friends killed by a fellow student, and suffering a serious stomach injury herself.

“I later learned that we had been shot by a 16-year-old student for reasons I will never know. He had brought his father’s weapon to school. A firearm I would come to know as a ghost gun,” she said.

Tretta went on to sue the seller of the weapon used.

“School shootings with ghost guns are on the rise. And the most lasting thing I have learned other than the loss of friends or the shattering of my youth is that nothing has relieved the pain in my heart like working to prevent more senseless shootings,” she said, praising Biden for “standing up for survivors” and taking “bold, meaningful action to stop the spread of ghost guns.”

Biden hugged Tretta after she spoke, then took the podium acknowledging the presence of so many survivors and victims’ families, and activists working for gun law reforms.

“The loss in this crowd is incalculable. But so is the strength,” he said.

“[You] represent individuals and families all across this country whose lives have been forever changed by a ghost gun. Some made national headlines, many others did not. We honor your strength and your action.

“A year ago this week I instructed the attorney general to write a regulation that would rein in the proliferation of ghost guns because I was having trouble getting past in the Congress, but I use what we call regulatory authority. A year later, we’re here. We keep that promise.”

That Biden is using executive authority to try to enact at least some reform is reflective of the current impasse he faces in Congress, despite Democrats controlling both houses and the White House.

As mass shootings and gun crimes, particularly those committed using ghost guns, have proliferated across the nation, Republicans have held up gun reforms in state houses across the country, as well as in Washington DC.

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Rashida Tlaib, Democratic congresswoman for Michigan, has announced she has tested positive for Covid-19, the first public acknowledgement of an infection by a prominent Washington figure this week, after a recent flurry.

Tlaib joins, among others, the House speaker Nancy Pelosi, senators Joaquin Castro and Susan Collins, Biden administration officials Tom Vilsack and Gina Raimondo, the mayor of Washington DC Muriel Bowser, and the attorney general Merrick Garland, who all announced they had received positive tests last week.

Tlaib, who says she is vaccinated and boosted, is experiencing symptoms, according to her tweet, and is currently isolating.

The White House has released more details of its soon-to-be-announced restrictions on “ghost guns.”

A fact sheet issued to accompany Joe Biden’s afternoon address from the Rose Garden says all such weapons put up for sale must be allocated a serial number so they can be traced in future.

Ghost guns are those assembled from kits, often purchased online, and without serial numbers, making it difficult, if not impossible to track them.

According to the fact sheet:

This final rule bans the business of manufacturing the most accessible ghost guns, such as unserialized ‘buy build shoot’ kits that individuals can buy online or at a store without a background check and can readily assemble into a working firearm in as little as 30 minutes with equipment they have at home,” the White House fact sheet states.

This rule clarifies that these kits qualify as “firearms” under the Gun Control Act, and that commercial manufacturers of such kits must therefore become licensed and include serial numbers on the kits’ frame or receiver, and commercial sellers of these kits must become federally licensed and run background checks prior to a sale – just like they have to do with other commercially-made firearms.

The final rule will also help turn some ghost guns already in circulation into serialized firearms. Through this rule, the Justice Department is requiring federally licensed dealers and gunsmiths taking any unserialized firearm into inventory to serialize that weapon.

At her afternoon briefing, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked if she thought Biden’s new rules would hold up in the face of expected stiff Republican opposition. Despite holding a majority in both houses of Congress, Democrats have been unable to progress gun control measures by way of legislation.

“The president is confident in any executive order and the legal authority that he puts forward,” she said.

“But what’s important to note about the announcement he is making today is that this is a rule that is supported by law enforcement. It is a rule that will help address what we know is a rising component of gun crimes across the country.”