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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2021
Biden administration
halts sale of federal
archives building
By GENE JOHNSON
Associated Press
Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about gun violence prevention in the Rose Garden at the White House on Thursday.
Biden tightens gun controls
By ALEXANDRA JAFFE,
AAMER MADHANI and
MICHAEL BALSAMO
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Pres-
ident Joe Biden, in his fi rst
gun control measures since
taking offi ce, announced a
half-dozen executive actions
Thursday aimed at addressing
a proliferation of gun violence
across the nation that he called
an “epidemic and an interna-
tional embarrassment.”
“The idea that we have so
many people dying every sin-
gle day from gun violence in
America is a blemish on our
character as a nation,” Biden
said during remarks at the
White House.
He announced he is tight-
ening regulations for buy-
ers of “ghost guns” — home-
made fi rearms that usually
are assembled from parts and
often lack serial numbers used
to trace them. Also, a pro-
posed rule, expected within 60
days, will tighten regulations
on pistol-stabilizing braces
like the one used in Boulder,
Colorado, in a shooting last
month that left 10 dead.
On Thursday, family mem-
bers whose children were
killed at the Sandy Hook,
Connecticut, school massa-
cre in 2012 and the shooting
at Marjory Stoneman Doug-
las High School in Parkland,
Florida, in 2018 attended the
hearing. Biden thanked them
for attending, saying he under-
stood it would remind them of
the awful days when they got
the calls.
He assured them, “We’re
absolutely determined to
make change.”
Biden’s
Thursday
announcement delivers on a
pledge the president made last
month to take what he termed
immediate “common-sense
steps” to address gun violence,
after a series of mass shoot-
ings drew renewed attention
to the issue. His announce-
ment came the same day as
yet another, this one in South
Carolina, where fi ve people
were killed.
Biden emphasized the
‘THE IDEA THAT WE HAVE
SO MANY PEOPLE DYING
EVERY SINGLE DAY FROM
GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA
IS A BLEMISH ON OUR
CHARACTER AS A NATION.’
President Joe Biden
scope of the problem:
Between the mass killings
in Atlanta massage busi-
nesses and the Colorado
grocery store shooting last
month, there were more than
850 additional shootings that
killed 250 and injured 500 in
the U.S., he said.
But Thursday’s announce-
ment underscores the lim-
itations of Biden’s execu-
tive power to act on guns.
His orders tighten regula-
tions on homemade guns and
provide more resources for
gun-violence prevention but
fall far short of the sweeping
gun-control agenda he laid out
on the campaign trail.
Indeed, Biden again
urged Congress to act, call-
ing on the Senate to take up
House-passed measures clos-
ing background check loop-
holes. He also said Congress
should pass the Violence
Against Women Act, elimi-
nate legal exemptions for gun
manufacturers and ban assault
weapons and high capacity
magazines.
“This is not a partisan issue
among the American people,”
Biden insisted.
While Biden asserted that
he’s “willing to work with
anyone to get it done,” gun
control measures face slim
prospects in an evenly divided
Senate, where Republicans
remain near-unifi ed against
most proposals.
Biden was joined at the
event by Vice President
Kamala Harris and Attorney
General Merrick Garland.
Garland said he was “under
no illusions about how hard it
is to solve the problem of gun
violence” and emphasized a
need for a “collective eff ort to
keep guns out of the hands of
criminals and save lives.”
The Justice Department
cannot solve the problem by
itself, he said, but “there is
work for the department to do,
and we intend to do it.”
It is legal to build a “ghost
gun” in a home or a workshop,
and there is no federal require-
ment for a background check.
The Justice Department
will issue a proposed rule
requiring such gun kits be
treated as fi rearms under
the Gun Control Act, which
would require that the parts
be made with serial numbers
and that buyers receive back-
ground checks.
Months before Biden was
elected, the federal govern-
ment had already been work-
ing on a proposed rule that
would change the defi nition
of a fi rearm to include lower
receivers, the essential piece
of a semiautomatic rifl e, in an
eff ort to combat the prolifera-
tion of ghost guns and to stave
off losing court battles over
the issue.
The process had been
in the works in the waning
months of the Trump admin-
istration, according to four
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people familiar with the mat-
ter. Justice Department lead-
ers and offi cials at the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Fire-
arms and Explosives had been
working on language for a
proposed rule since at least
the summer of 2020, the peo-
ple said.
Another change announced
Thursday concerns a proposed
rule that will designate pistols
used with stabilizing braces
as short-barreled rifl es, which
require a federal license to
own and are subject to a more
thorough application process
and a $200 tax.
The department also is
publishing model legislation
within 60 days that is intended
to make it easier for states to
adopt their own “red fl ag”
laws. Such laws allow for
individuals to petition a court
to allow the police to con-
fi scate weapons from a per-
son deemed to be a danger to
themselves or others.
SEATTLE — The Biden
administration has halted
its predecessor’s decision
to sell the federal archives
building in Seattle, fol-
lowing months of opposi-
tion from people across the
Pacifi c Northwest and a
lawsuit.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray
and U.S. Sen. Maria Cant-
well, both Washington state
Democrats,
announced
Thursday that the federal
Offi ce of Management and
Budget had withdrawn its
approval for the sale, which
would have forced the trans-
fer of millions of records
to facilities in Kansas City,
Missouri, and Riverside,
California.
A federal judge had
already temporarily blocked
the sale, pending a lawsuit
by Washington, Oregon and
more than two dozen Native
American and Alaska Native
tribes. Last month, 25 of the
26 members of Congress
from Washington, Oregon,
Idaho and Alaska signed a
letter by Cantwell and U.S.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an
Alaska Republican, urging
the Biden administration to
reverse course.
“While this process
never should have begun in
the fi rst place without Tribal
and local consultation, I’m
glad that OMB has listened
to local Tribes and reversed
their decision to approve the
sale of the Seattle Archive
building,” Murray said in
a news release. “I will con-
tinue working to ensure the
generations of artifacts and
history stored in the Seattle
facility will remain acces-
sible to stakeholders across
the Pacifi c Northwest.”
The records at the
National Archives facil-
ity date to the 1840s and
include documents key to
the histories of 272 federally
recognized tribes in Wash-
ington, Alaska, Oregon and
Idaho. It houses all federal
records generated in the
Pacifi c Northwest, includ-
ing military service, land,
court, tax, marriage and cen-
sus documents.
The documents also
include records of Japanese
Americans sent to intern-
ment camps during World
War II. There are 50,000
fi les related to the Chinese
Exclusion Act, which lim-
ited the presence of Chinese
laborers in the U.S. from
1882 until 1943, including
photos and interrogations of
Chinese immigrants.
Only a tiny fraction of
the records have been digi-
tized, and the facility is fre-
quently used for research
related to genealogy, land
use and water rights, treaties
and other historical topics.
Tom Wooten, chairman
of the Samish Indian Nation
near Anacortes, Washing-
ton, noted Thursday that
tribes have often resorted
to the archives to vindi-
cate their treaty rights and
their oral traditions. He has
researched his own family
history there, he said.
“This material is too
important and too valuable
to leave this area,” Woo-
ten said. “You have to know
where you come from.
There’s no way folks could
go to Kansas City or Cal-
ifornia to do that kind of
research.”
The little-known Public
Buildings Reform Board,
which was created in 2016
to help sell off surplus fed-
eral property, decided in late
2019 to sell the National
Archives building under
the Federal Assets Sale and
Transfer Act. The Offi ce of
Management and Budget
approved it in early 2020.