President Joe Biden on Tuesday pushed for stricter gun laws and more police funding as the answer to gun violence as Republicans paint the Democratic Party as soft on crime.
Speaking about his “Safer America Plan” in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Biden used the speech to call for a ban on assault-style weapons to address mass shootings and sought to portray Republicans as opposed to the law enforcement resources needed to stem the crime wave gripping many major cities.
Here are three checks on the claims Biden made during his remarks.
“For 10 years, mass shootings were down. Ten years in a row, since I passed that legislation in 1994 as a senator. But in 2004, Republicans let that ban expire. What happened? Mass shootings in America tripled.”
Biden is referring to the 1994 ban on assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines that Congress allowed to expire 10 years after its passage. Biden supported the bill as a senator from Delaware.
The effectiveness of the legislation in reducing mass shootings and gun violence more broadly has long been scrutinized. Northeastern University professor James Alan Fox published a 2013 paper in the journal Homicide Studies showing roughly the same number of mass shootings before and during the ban — 18 per year from 1976 to 1994 and 19 per year from 1995 to 2004. The average rose to 21 after the ban lapsed.
But some newer research has lent credence to the idea that mass shootings dropped under the law. The president appears to be citing a 2019 study by New York University’s School of Medicine, which found the number of mass shooting deaths dropped while the ban was in place and then tripled over the period 2005-2015.
Each study has a different methodology, including how a mass shooting is defined. The 2019 paper looked at incidents in which four or more people died.
“Guns are the No. 1 killer of children in America. … We have to act. We have to act for those families in Buffalo, Uvalde, Newtown, El Paso, Parkland, Charleston, Las Vegas, Orlando.”
As gun violence increased nationwide in 2020, firearms overtook motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death for those aged 19 and younger for the first time. Nearly 4,400 were killed by firearms, while vehicles killed nearly 4,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest data.
Although the president linked the deaths of minors to mass shootings, listing off high-profile massacres that have occurred over the last decade, these shootings account for very few of the firearm deaths. The vast majority of youth gun fatalities are due to suicide, domestic violence, gang activity, and accidents.
“Most commonly what makes the news is these horrific mass shootings, but they are a small aspect of the overall problem,” Patrick Carter, co-director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, told NPR. “The smallest portion are the mass shootings. … It’s these daily deaths that are occurring making up the totality of what we are seeing.”
At the same time as firearm deaths have risen among juveniles, car safety improvements have steadily driven down the child fatality rates from vehicle crashes.
“Every single Republican member of Congress, every single one in this state, every single one voted against the support for law enforcement. They talk about how much they love it. They voted against the funding.”
Biden accused Republicans of turning their backs on the police because they voted against the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill that GOP lawmakers argued was largely unnecessary and would contribute to inflation. Democrats in both chambers of Congress passed the law on party-line votes last year.
Biden mentioned the $350 billion in funding the law set aside for state and local governments, saying his administration has encouraged state leaders to put the money toward reducing crime. The White House announced in May that $10 billion of the funds had been committed to “public safety and violence prevention.”
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The funds weren’t specifically earmarked for public safety, as states and cities had the discretion to put the money toward a wide range of public investments, according to the bill text, including “water, sewer, or broadband infrastructure,” “assistance to households, small businesses, and nonprofits,” and “aid to impacted industries such as tourism, travel, and hospitality.”
The administration did, however, tout the impact it would have on essential workers, including firefighters and police, giving cash-strapped states navigating the pandemic the resources needed to hire back laid-off personnel.
