Less than a week after the horrifying mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, then-President Barack Obama announced that his vice president Joe Biden would be heading up a task force to develop “a set of concrete proposals [for reducing gun violence,] no later than January.”
“This is not some Washington commission,” the president promised. “This is not something where folks are going to be studying the issue for six months and publishing a report that gets read and then pushed aside. This is a team that has a very specific task: to pull together real reforms right now.” So, serious stuff.
Biden met with victims’ groups and gun control groups at the White House. He conducted conference calls with “governors of both parties, and state and local elected leaders.” He took all their best ideas and wrote up his suggestions.
“Now is the Time: The President’s plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence” was a 15-page proposal that features all the well-worn — and often unconstitutional and/or ineffective — proposals we’d been debating for 20 years. The one conspicuous difference was the report’s heavy focus on mental health as a contributing factor to gun violence, something leading gun restrictionist Chris Murphy now calls “bullsh-t.”
In any event, in the second section, the Biden proposal says (emphasis added to the last line):
Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime: The Attorney General will work with all United States Attorneys to
