The NRA criticised President Biden’s establishment of the first-ever federal agency to combat “gun violence prevention,” as well as the director of the office, who has frequently sworn on social media to “defeat” the Second Amendment movement.
“The Biden administration’s new White House Office of so-called ‘Gun Violence Prevention’ might as well be renamed the ‘Federal Office to Disarm Law-Abiding Americans and Defeat the NRA.’ One doesn’t have to look far into Stefanie Feldman’s social media to see biases and agenda: a barrage of over 20 posts aggressively targeting the NRA, combined with promises of ‘big, bold’ executive action on gun control, paints a clear picture,” NRA spokesman Billy McLaughlin told Fox News Digital.
Last week, Biden announced the establishment of the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which would be headed by Vice President Kamala Harris and have Stefanie Feldman as its director. Biden’s longtime assistant is Feldman.
“Every time I’ve met with families impacted by gun violence as they mourn their loved ones, and I’ve met with so many throughout the country, they all have the same message for their elected officials: ‘do something,’” Biden said in a statement leading up to the announcement.
Biden said the establishment of the office would “send a clear message about how important this issue is to me and to the country” and would “centralize, accelerate, and intensify our work to save more lives more quickly.”
Reviewing Feldman’s X account reveals a few conversations that date back as least to 2019 in which he vowed to destroy the NRA, former President Trump, and gun manufacturers. Other messages lauded gun control activist groups that had endorsed Biden for president in 2020.
“Vote Biden. Defeat the NRA,” Stefanie Feldman posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2020, adding that, “The stakes are high.”
Brady has joined Team Joe in full. We’ll defeat Donald Trump together. The NRA, a group that supports Biden’s presidential bid, and gun makers will then be defeated, Feldman said in a post in March 2020.
“Biden will be the gun safety president. He’s beaten the NRA before,” she wrote in another post in January 2020.
“Joe Biden isn’t afraid of the NRA & gun manufacturers. He’s defeated them twice before (background checks & assault weapons/high-cap mag bans). As president, he’ll defeat them again. And, he’ll repeal the non-sensical liability protection for gun manufacturers,” she wrote in another post in 2019.
Harris has issued similar posts, including a post last month saying, “@JoeBiden has taken on the @NRA and won. He can do it again,” which was accompanied by a campaign ad celebrating Biden’s determination to “ban assault weapons.”
In 1994, when Biden was a senator from Delaware, he voted in favour of a significant crime bill that included a prohibition on semiautomatic weapons. The previous President Clinton signed the bill into law, which imposed a 10-year prohibition on the production, transfer, and possession of “semiautomatic assault weapons” and “large capacity ammunition feeding devices.”
When George W. Bush was president and the Republicans were in control of both chambers of Congress in 2004, the statute was set to expire.
A Department of Justice study, published in 1999 that examined the short-term effects of the ban, found it “failed to reduce the average number of victims per gun murder incident or multiple gunshot wound victims.” Another DOJ study published in 2004 determined the ban’s “effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
Democrats, though, have persisted in supporting the legislation as a measure to stop mass shootings.
In response to the NRA’s criticism of the office and Feldman’s posts, a White House official told Fox News Digital that the president “believes American kids shouldn’t have to learn to duck and cover before they learn to read and write.”
“President Biden believes we can’t have law enforcement officers being confronted with weapons of war on our streets. President Biden believes you can’t be tough on crime and soft on guns. And President Biden will continue to be unequivocal and relentless in working to make our communities safer and urging Congress to act on commonsense gun safety legislation that will save lives,” the spokesperson continued.
McLaughlin argued in his comment to Fox News Digital this month that the Biden White House is “using gun control to divert attention from the Biden Crime Wave.”
“This administration is using gun control to divert attention from the Biden Crime Wave and their soft-on-criminal policies, destroying communities across America. Rather than spending his time on vacation and cozying up to the deep pockets of the gun control lobby, perhaps it’s time for Joe Biden to tackle the real issues and focus on the rising crime rates,” he said.
