The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack  Obama to move unilaterally on gun control, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of House  Democrats on Monday, the administration’s first definitive statements about its  response to last month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Later this week, Obama will formally announce his proposals to reduce gun  violence, which are expected to include renewal of the assault weapons ban,  universal background checks and prohibition of high-capacity magazine clips. But  Biden, who has been leading Obama’s task force on the response, spent two hours  briefing a small group of sympathetic House Democrats on the road ahead in the  latest White House outreach to invested groups.

The focus on executive orders is the result of the White House and other  Democrats acknowledging the political difficulty of enacting any new gun  legislation, a topic Biden did not address in Monday’s meeting.

The executive actions could include giving the Centers for Disease Control  and Prevention authority to conduct national research on guns, more aggressive  enforcement of existing gun laws and pushing for wider sharing of existing gun  databases among federal and state agencies, members of Congress in the meeting  said.

“It was all focusing on enforcing existing law, administering things like  improving the background database, things like that that do not involve a change  in the law but enforcing and making sure that the present law is administered as  well as possible,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.).

The White House declined to comment on the details of what Obama will  propose.

But Biden did indicate that the remains of the Obama campaign apparatus may  be activated in the effort.

“He said that this has been a real focus on the policy and that the politics  of this issue, that a strategy on the politics of the issue hasn’t been  undertaken yet,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) told POLITICO. “He did remind us  that the campaign infrastructure is still accessible.”

Biden did not address two of the more significant issues in the gun debate:  the appointment of a permanent director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,  Firearms and Explosives, and the role violent images in the entertainment  industry play in the nation’s gun violence.