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On Tuesday, President Joe Biden will travel to Monterey Park, Calif., the site of a January mass shooting, to announce a new executive order intended to increase the number of background checks for gun purchases, according to a senior administration official.

The president will also renew his call for Congress to pass gun control legislation — including a ban on military-style weapons and universal background checks — senior administration officials said.

“These are not controversial solutions anywhere except for in Washington, D.C., in Congress,” a senior administration official said. “You get to the majority of kitchen tables across the country, they support universal background checks and the action the president is proposing to move closer to universal background checks is just common sense.”

The order will direct Attorney General Merrick Garland to encourage firearm dealers to run background checks required by law to get “as close as we can to universal background checks without additional legislation in order to keep guns out of the hands of felons and domestic abusers,” the senior administration official said.

The goal is to make clear to gun sellers wilfully or unknowingly violating the law what the requirements are and raise the rate of compliance, senior administration officials said.

Garland will also be instructed to release Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives inspection records of gun dealers who violated federal laws, in an attempt to educate the public and provide data for lawmakers to use in crafting legislation, according to senior administration officials.

Biden chose Monterey Park, a city just east of Los Angeles, as the site of his announcement because of the January mass shooting – which left 11 dead and nine wounded – that rocked the community, officials said.

On Jan. 22, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran entered a dance hall in Monterey Park during a Lunar New Year celebration and opened fire, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The shooting at a ballroom popular with older Asian Americans was the United States’ deadliest mass shooting since 21 people were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in May of last year and the deadliest mass shooting of 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence across the country. 

There have been 109 mass shootings so far this year, according to the archive.

The violence in Monterey Park could have gotten much worse had Tran not been disarmed at a second dance hall by 26-year-old Brandon Tsay, an employee whose grandparents owned the studio, before he could shoot anyone else. Biden honored Tsay at the State of the Union in February, calling on Congress to send gun control legislation to his desk.

“He saved lives. It’s time we do the same as well. Ban assault weapons once and for all,” Biden said. “We did it before. I led the fight to ban them in 1994.”

Biden’s focus on assault weapons echoes his work on the federal assault weapons ban nearly thirty years ago while in the Senate, part of the 1994 crime bill.

Last summer, Biden signed the most expansive gun violence legislation since then into law, which included provisions that intensified background checks for gun buyers aged 18 to 21 and expanded the gun purchasing ban for convicted domestic abusers to include dating partners not living with their victim, closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole.”

“We’re going to ban assault weapons again come hell or high water,” Biden said earlier this month at Democrats’ congressional retreat in Baltimore. “And high-capacity magazines. When we did it last time, it reduced mass death.”

A 2019 New York University School of Medicine study determined mass shooting fatalities were 70% less likely during the ten-year federal ban.

Tran used a semi-automatic pistol called the Cobray CM-11, a variant of the MAC-10, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said in the days after the attack. Luna said investigators believed it was purchased in 1999 in Monterey Park, which would mean it was in violation of the  1994 federal assault weapons ban that lasted 10 years and California’s 1989 assault weapon ban in California.

Despite a Republican-controlled Congress and a slim Democratic majority in the Senate, senior administration officials expressed hope for future compromises and cited the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in June, an unlikely political reality just months prior.

“You’ll absolutely hear him call for legislation tomorrow,” a senior administration official said. “But in the meantime, he wants the federal government to be doing all we can with existing authority to reduce gun violence.”

The bipartisan gun safety bill was passed last summer in the wake of mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. 

Senior administration officials specifically cited the Buffalo mass shooting — where an 18-year-old targeted shoppers and workers at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood — as inspiration for another aspect of the executive order: creating a mechanism to address the needs of a community targeted by mass shootings.

No existing federal infrastructure currently exists to provide aid to communities after mass shootings, like there is for natural disasters, officials said. Biden plans to direct his cabinet to come up with a proposal to support affected communities’ needs, according to senior administration officials, including mental health care, financial assistance, and food — as could have been helpful in Buffalo, where the shooting closed down the neighborhood’s only grocery store.

The order will also include directing federal agencies to partner with law enforcement, health care providers, educators and community leaders to bring awareness and increase usage of so-called “red flag” laws in the 19 states and Washington, D.C., where they are on the books, according to senior administration officials. The law allows people to petition courts to temporarily take away firearms from individuals deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.

The president will instruct the Department of Transportation to work with the Department of Justice to combat the rising rate of firearms reported lost or stolen while shipped by licensed firearm dealers, senior administration officials said, citing federal data that shows a 250% increase in missing weapons between 2018 and 2022.

And Biden will direct federal law enforcement agencies to increase their usage of and establish “rigorous requirements” for data submission by agencies to the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, a database used by federal, state, and local law enforcement to match bullet casings to the guns they were fired from. 

On Monday, Biden was in San Diego, meeting with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to announce the sale of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia as part of a security alliance between the three nations.

The president will then be in Las Vegas Wednesday to discuss his proposal to lower prescription drug costs.