President Biden announced on Sunday that flags at federal buildings would be lowered to half-staff until sunset on Thursday in honor of those killed in the mass shooting in Allen, Tex.
It is not the first time Biden has ordered a similar response. He’s already done so twice this year, first after the January mass shooting in Monterey Park, Calif., and then after the mass shooting in Nashville in March.
As president, Biden has pushed for legislation that might help reduce the number of mass-shooting incidents in the United States, a number that vastly outpaces other countries. Since he was inaugurated, that’s included more than 40 days in which flags have been lowered to recognize the victims of such incidents.
Biden is not the first president to use the flags at federal buildings as a way to commemorate those victims. President Barack Obama did so regularly, helping give him the unhappy distinction of having issued more proclamations lowering the flag than any prior president.
President Donald Trump similarly ordered that flags be lowered in the wake of five mass-shooting incidents during his presidency. The deadliest such shooting in American history — the attack on a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017 — was the first such declaration from Trump, according to a review of his White House statements.
To date, using records from the White House and the site Half Staff Alert, Biden has nine times ordered flags be lowered after mass shootings. Remember that Biden has so far been in office for four days relative to each week Trump served. Flags have been lowered in the wake of mass shootings for almost three times as many days.
Biden’s presidency has also overlapped with more mass-shooting events than did Trump’s, thanks in part to the pandemic year of 2020 being relatively quiet on that front. It’s not solely the case that Biden is ordering flags be lowered in an effort to draw attention to such events; it’s often the case that people who notice a flag at half-staff on a federal building may not know why it has been lowered.
It is also true, though, that Biden has only a very limited tool kit to apply to the problem. Having the flag lowered an average of one day every three weeks to commemorate mass shooting victims is, at the very least, more than nothing.