The State of the Union comes just 38 days into the new year, but already there have been 60 mass shootings in the U.S., according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. Brandon Tsay, who disarmed the gunman at the Jan. 21, 2023 deadly attack at Monterey Park, California, was among the attendees in Congress to hear Biden speak.

Biden detailed what his administration was able to do to promote gun control, notably through provisions contained in the Safer Communities Act. Hailed by Biden as “the most sweeping gun safety law in three decades,” the act was limited in scope, but experts believe its modest reforms will save lives.

Among other provisions, it gives support to states to pass so-called “red flag laws” that allow authorities to seize the firearms of individuals deemed to be a threat. Political scientist John A. Tures of LaGrange College has examined the effectiveness of red flag laws.

He found that states that passed such legislation saw significantly lower firearm death rates than states without them.

“In 2020, if there were no red flag laws, I estimate that 52,530 Americans would have died in gun deaths. The number actually recorded was 45,222, indicating red flag laws saved 7,308 American lives that year,” Tures writes.

Lives – mainly female ones – will also be saved by the closing of the “boyfriend loophole,” which had allowed some people with a record of domestic violence to keep and buy firearms. The Safer Communities Act extended the wording in a federal ban to “those who have or have had a continuing relationship of a romantic or intimate nature.” April Zeoli at Michigan State University writes that closing the boyfriend loophole will save lives. But she notes in a separate article that recent court rulings may allow domestic abusers to keep their guns.

Meanwhile, Biden called for a ban on assault weapons “once and for all.” Such a ban once existed but was allowed to lapse. But do bans on assault rifles work? Yes, writes Michael J. Klein of New York University, who was part of a team that analyzed the impact of the federal ban on assault rifles in place for a decade from 1994.

“We calculated that the risk of a person in the U.S. dying in a mass shooting was 70% lower during the period in which the assault weapons ban was active,” he writes.

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Biden came to the State of the Union armed with economic data showing robust job growth and evidence that once-soaring inflation is beginning to fall.

With the United States’ increasing national debt as a backdrop, Biden outlined a plan to boost government revenues through a minimum tax for billionaires and a quadrupling of the tax on corporate stock buybacks.

Even if Republicans in Congress were to approve the measures, it is unlikely to set a course for a new era of progressive taxation. As Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, explain, similar plans eyed by Democrats in recent years hardly amount to squeezing the uber-rich; in fact, they do little to reverse the decadeslong trend toward regressive taxation, in which lower earners pay a larger percentage of their earnings in tax than wealthier ones.

The two economists conclude that although it would “increase taxes on millionaires significantly,” the 2021 proposal put forward by Democrats would “largely leave billionaires off the hook, despite the explosion of their wealth during the pandemic.”

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Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

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