At the White House, President Obama formally announced Wednesday the appointment of Joe Biden to head a new White House-led effort to reform gun control policies, to be outlined in the annual State of the Union address next month.

President Obama: “I asked the vice president to lead an effort that includes members of my cabinet and outside organizations to come up with a set of concrete proposals no later than January, proposals that I then intend to push without delay. This is not some Washington commission. This is not something where folks are going to be studying the issue for six months and publishing a report that gets read and then pushed aside. This is a team that has a very specific task: to pull together real reforms right now.”