Bipartisan Bill Cracks Down on Targeted Violence

In a bipartisan effort aimed to create a task force that would offer a national strategy “to keep communities safe from targeted violence through threat assessment and management,” Senator Marco Rubio has teamed up with freshman Democrat Senator Kyrsten Sinema to introduce the “Threat Assessment Prevention, and Safety Act.” Both Senators argue that signing this bill to law “would help provide resources, training, and assistance in establishing and operating locally driven threat assessment and managing units.”

Furthermore, the bill is specifically designed to develop guidelines and provide states with the proper “training, resources, and support they need in order to stand up community-based, multidisciplinary behavioral threat assessment and management units” while also creating a “temporary task force made up of experts in behavioral threat assessment and management to make recommendations to Congress for a National Strategy for preventing targeted violence.”

Speaking on the benefits of the bill being signed to law, Senator Rubio noted that “We must proactively engage with experts in the field of threat assessments in order to help prevent future tragedies.”

He further explained that “We have the expertise to implement systems to identify and stop dangerous individuals before they commit an act of violence, but we have yet to fully and effectively develop and utilize it to prevent future attacks. By bringing threat assessment experts together and utilizing evidence-based behavioral threat assessment and management processes, this bill will help equip our communities with the tools they need to prevent future tragedies."

Senator Rubio concluded, thanking "Senators Sinema and Tillis for leading this effort with me in the Senate and Congressman Babin for his continued leadership in the House.”

Since the beginning of the year, Senator Marco Rubio has focused on targeting violence, and most recently he also reintroduced the “Extreme Risk Protection Order and Violence Prevention Act.”