Orlando Sentinel: Maxwell Frost slams Trump shutdown of Gun Violence Prevention office
Anyone attempting to visit the site for the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention began seeing a “404 page not found” message shortly after President Trump was sworn in to his second term.
U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost confirmed that the office, which he helped spur the Biden Administration to create in 2023, had been quietly shut down.
“The office is gone,” Frost told the Orlando Sentinel.
The National Rifle Association took notice and praised the office’s apparent closing, writing on X on Tuesday that the “taxpayer-funded gun control office was used by the Biden administration to advance its anti-gun agenda and infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of peaceable Americans.”
But Frost said he didn’t expect Trump to officially announce the office’s demise.
“Trump knows it’s bad politics for him to come out and say, ‘I’ve eliminated this office,’ because, the fact of the matter is, gun violence has gone down over the last four years,” he said.
Frost, D-Orlando, started his political career as a gun reform advocate, becoming the national organizing director of the group March for Our Lives. Frost campaigned as a survivor of gun violence, having fled for his life along with dozens of other people after someone started firing during a Halloween celebration in downtown Orlando in 2016.
“This is something I had been working on long before Congress, when I was at March for Our Lives and we really wanted this office,” Frost said. “There is no federal agency that solely focuses on ending gun violence holistically, sending people to towns when a shooting happens to help them out and help them get through it.”
After his election to Congress in 2022, Frost wrote a bill to create such an office, but he knew it would not get passed by the Republican House majority.
“That’s why I went to the White House and said, ‘Let’s just start it through an executive action,’” Frost said. “So my bill was used as the framework for it.”
Frost was present in the White House Rose Garden when President Joe Biden announced the office’s creation. In its 16 months of existence, it helped implement the Safer Communities Act, passed in 2022, which has distributed federal grant money to communities such as Orlando, which received a $1.5 million grant in October.
“Under President Biden, after the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, gun violence went down,” Frost said. “And after this office, we’ve seen it go down even further, upwards of 40% in certain cities across the country and even in the city of Orlando.”
Because the office was created via executive order, not legislation, the new President can get rid of it.
It was one of many offices the new administration has shut down since Trump’s inauguration Monday. Among the others are the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which worked at reducing civilian casualties in war.
Last year, Frost said, there was a legislative effort to defund the gun prevention office, but it failed because seven moderate Republicans joined Democrats in blocking it.
Though the office appears shuttered, Frost said he will still work on gun safety issues and hopes the new president, “a guy who blows with the wind,” will be supportive.
During his first term, Trump banned bump stocks, which allow rifles to fire like machine guns, following the Las Vegas shootings in 2017 that killed 60 people, Frost noted. That ban was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024.
“He’s going to do whatever he thinks might make him a little more popular in the moment,” Frost said. “He woke up and decided to do it, because public pressure made him do it. So we’re not going to lose all hope here.”
By: Steven Lemongello
Source: Orlando Sentinel