President Joe Biden campaigned for the Oval Office on promises of sweeping gun reform. While some of his proposals never materialized, his administration will leave behind a bevy of initiatives meant to aid law enforcement, prevent shootings, and crack down on rogue gun sellers and traffickers.
Now, as the president prepares to leave the White House on January 20, gun violence prevention advocates and political experts are taking stock of his record.
“It’s clear that Biden has been by far the strongest gun safety president in American history,” said Emma Brown, the executive director of the gun violence prevention group Giffords. “He has made a critical contribution in the fight to end this epidemic in this country.”
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to nix many of his predecessor’s initiatives, but some advocates hope that the growing national concern over gun violence will force him to shy away from dismantling much of Biden’s legacy on gun reform.
“People are just tired of these mass shootings,” said Steve Lindley, senior programs and policy manager at Brady United. “The problem is not going away. The statistics are what the statistics are.”
Biden assumed the presidency with violent crime and gun sales surging as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Less than two months after he took office, lawmakers in the U.S. House passed bills to expand background checks to all gun sales and extend the deadline for the FBI to vet prospective gun buyers. The legislation was a priority for the Biden administration, but the measures would eventually stall in the Senate.
“As president, Biden certainly fell short of where he wanted to be on policy terms with gun violence,” said Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York in Cortland. “But he did remarkably well given the constraints and limitations he faced.”
Investigating America’s gun violence crisis
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With Congress gridlocked, the president in April 2021 issued executive actions intended to curb the use of guns in crime. He ordered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to propose rules restricting the availability of pistol braces — an accessory used in a mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, two weeks earlier — as well as kits for making homemade, untraceable “ghost guns.” He also nominated David Chipman — a former ATF special agent — to be the agency’s first permanent director in six years.
While Chipman’s nomination was playing out on Capitol Hill, an investigation by The Trace and USA TODAY found that the ATF had routinely allowed gun dealers to stay in business even after committing violations that could have armed criminals. Biden responded by directing the ATF to revoke the licenses of gun dealers who willfully commit violations like transferring firearms to convicted felons and failing to run background checks on customers. The zero-tolerance policy caused revocations to soar.
Chipman wanted to make the ATF more consistent in policing gun dealers and more proactive in fighting gun crime in general, but by the summer of 2021, it was becoming increasingly clear that his nomination to lead the agency was going to fail.
Since retiring from the ATF, Chipman had worked as a gun violence prevention advocate with groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords. Those credentials, along with a barrage of disinformation about the former agent and his family, turned Republicans and even some Democrats against him. One GOP senator, Steve Daines of Montana, said installing Chipman as director would be like hiring “an arsonist to lead the fire department.” (Through its nonpolitical arm, Everytown provides grants to The Trace. You can find our donor transparency policy here, and our editorial independence policy here.)
Unable to line up the votes, Biden pulled Chipman’s nomination, an embarrassing setback for the White House. Afterward, Chipman said he had received little backing from the Biden administration throughout the bruising confirmation process.
Chipman declined to comment for this article.
As president, Biden certainly fell short of where he wanted to be on policy terms with gun violence. But he did remarkably well given the constraints and limitations he faced.
Robert Spitzer, political science professor at the State University of New York in Cortland
Biden saw reshaping the ATF as critical to his agenda, and within several months, he was ready to take another stab at obtaining a director who was willing and able to carry out his policies. The president ultimately tapped Steve Dettelbach, a former U.S. attorney from Ohio whose support among law enforcement and prosecutors made him more palatable to the Senate. Dettelbach was confirmed in July 2022.
Spitzer, the political science professor, said Biden’s knack for reaching compromises in an increasingly divided Washington is one reason the president has moved the needle on gun policy further than his predecessors. “Biden is extraordinarily good at that behind the scenes back and forth, and it’s not a skill many lawmakers take an interest in,” Spitzer said.
He pointed to the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first significant gun reform legislation to pass Congress in nearly three decades. The act enhanced background checks for prospective gun purchasers who are under 21, tightened requirements for gun sellers, pumped money into violence prevention programs, and created the first-ever federal law against gun trafficking. As of June, prosecutors had used the anti-trafficking provisions to charge more than 500 defendants.
Biden’s longstanding relationships with lawmakers and ability to call in favors were crucial to convincing nearly 30 Republicans to break with their party and approve the measure, Spitzer said. “That is an attribute of Biden that he virtually gets no credit for. You have to line up votes in the Senate and House, and he knows that stuff. He just does.”
In 2023, Biden launched the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to coordinate federal efforts for a more holistic approach to the issue. The office supports communities affected by mass shootings and runs a resource center to help states implement red flag laws, which allow courts to temporarily disarm people deemed to be a threat to themselves or others.
Despite his knack for dealmaking, Biden has mostly opted to use his executive powers rather than working with Congress. In October, the president created a task force to crack down on machine gun conversion devices, the small accessories that can effectively turn a normal semiautomatic handgun into a machine gun. He also ordered his administration to work on improving school shooter drills, encouraging safe gun storage, and allowing state Medicaid programs to reimburse health care providers for gun safety and injury prevention counseling.
“In almost every point in the administration, Biden is looking to see where executive action can make a change, and saying, ‘Let’s do whatever we can to essentially harden our defenses against problems of gun violence,’” said John Donohue, a law and economics professor at Stanford University.
Many of Biden’s actions have resulted in significant pushback. Texas, Utah, and 24 other states are pursuing a lawsuit against an ATF rule meant to rein in unlicensed gun selling, contending that it threatens state tax revenues from firearm sales. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is considering a challenge to the ATF rule on ghost gun kits. Gun violence prevention advocates credit that rule, implemented in 2022, with helping drive the country’s largest ghost gun manufacturer out of business.
The ghost gun challenge is the first gun case to reach the Supreme Court since June, when the justices reversed a legal precedent known as the Chevron deference, which gave agencies like the ATF more latitude to interpret laws they are charged with implementing.
Timothy Lytton, a Georgia State University law professor, said the overturning of Chevron signaled the Supreme Court’s desire to limit executive powers. That would make it harder for future presidents to pursue gun reform without buy-in from Congress. “Administrations going forward are going to have far less leeway and far less capacity to carry out firearms restriction purely through executive agencies like the ATF,” Lytton said.
Some of Biden’s accomplishments could be short-lived. Gun reform advocates expect Trump to either shutter the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention or refashion it as an outfit to promote gun rights. The president-elect has promised to sack Dettelbach, the ATF director, on Day One.
During a July news conference, he bristled at the thought of his gun reform legacy unraveling should he lose reelection. “We can’t afford to lose what we’ve done,” Biden said. “More children are killed by a bullet than any other cause of death — in the United States of America. What are we doing?”
Bernard Zapor, a retired ATF agent who is now a criminal justice professor at Arizona State University, said Biden made major progress, but it will take longer than one presidential term and efforts from every branch of government to significantly reduce gun violence.
“It will take the consensus of a nation, and a legislature that follows the will of the people, to reduce gun deaths while preserving our rights,” Zapor said. “A single president cannot do this.”
