Is Obama a feckless wimp for tearing up as he recalled the massacre of 20 first graders at Sandy Hook elementary school?
Or is he a calculating tyrant for bypassing a do-nothing obstructionist, NRA-controlled Congress by issuing modest executive orders, a subterfuge to ultimate seizure of all 300 million guns in circulation?
Republicans think he is both.
He is neither. He is a courageous leader who is using his skill and intelligence to thread an impossible need of what is within his authority as president. Indeed, he is doing exactly what gun rights fanatics are saying he should: enforce existing laws.
“We’re not writing a new law. Only Congress can do that,” the president stated. “This is about enforcing existing laws, and closing what has grown into a massive loophole where a huge percentage of guns — many of whom end up being traced to crime — are not going through the responsible gun dealers, but are going through irresponsible folks who are not registered as doing business.
And the whole goal here is to clarify and to put on notice that if you’re a business, even if you don’t have bricks and mortar, then you’re supposed to register, you’re supposed to conduct background checks.
So the issue is not where you do it, it’s what you’re doing. And that should not be something that threatens responsible gun dealers across the country.”
Obama’s proposals, “have been portrayed as trying to take people’s guns away as opposed to trying to make sure that the laws are enforced,” he said during the CNN Town Hall. “And one of the most frustrating things that I hear is when people say — who are opposed to any further laws — why don’t you just enforce the laws that are on the books, and those very same members of Congress then cut ATF budgets to make it impossible to enforce the law…
“This notion of a conspiracy out there, and it gets wrapped up in concerns about the federal government. Now, there’s a long history of that. That’s in our DNA. The United States was born suspicious of some distant authority.
“So, yes, it is a false notion that I believe is circulated for either political reasons or commercial reasons in order to prevent a coming together among people of goodwill to develop common-sense rules that will make us safer while preserving the Second Amendment.”
Obama showed remarkable courage in standing in front of CNN’s Town Hall, not stocked with supporters and advocates, but in more than equal measure filled with those who see guns rights as a be-all-and-end-all and distrust him the most (contrast to the cowardice of the NRA, turning down CNN’s invitation to participate and defend its positions.)
In his town hall appearance, he spoke against the lies being circulated about his executive actions — ‘for political or profit” reasons. And you could hear the specific ones framed by the questioners — the rape victim who feared she would not have a gun to protect herself (never mind that in all likelihood, she would either be unable to shoot an intruder, the intruder would steal her gun away from her and use it on her, or that her child would find it and kill a sibling or herself, and that none of his proposals would interfere with her owning a gun ); the sheriff running for Congress who swept away any restriction on access to guns as unconstitutional, never mind that police (the good guy with the gun) are most endangered by the easy access of criminals to guns and now “lone-wolf” terrorists, as in Philadelphia just this weekend.
Each makes the claim that there already are laws on the books, the government only needs enforce them.
But that’s the essence of what these executive orders propose: to enforce existing laws.
But Obama is asking for 200 more federal agents to do background checks, and money for better systems to track lost and stolen guns. The Bush Administration, in addition to letting the assault-weapons ban lapse (resulting in a geometrically increased incidence of massacres), also imposed a three-day rule (how the Charleston 9 murderer was able to get his gun), by which if the background check isn’t completed, the purchaser gets a gun.
Indeed, what Obama proposes would be a boon to gun manufacturers and gun sellers — leveling the playing field with those who traffic guns, so that “anybody in the business of selling firearms must get a license and conduct background checks, or be subject to criminal prosecutions. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing it over the Internet or at a gun show. It’s not where you do it, but what you do.”
Even if you assert the notion that the Constitution guarantees a right to bear arms, it says nothing about a right to sell them, which means the government should be able to impose restrictions on who sells guns and on the manufacture of guns, themselves — for example, voting is described in the Constitution but there are federal laws that now require electronic voting machines. (The Republicans have no problem putting restrictions on abortion clinics or making voter registration and polling places inaccessible.)
Smart technology; better monitoring of lost and stolen guns: A major initiative the President proposed was to advance smart-gun technology, but in fact, he could have gone further.
Even if you advocate for a right to own a gun, there should be no opposition to requiring a lethal weapon to use existing technology so that it can be used only by that person – smart gun technology like finger print ID Some 500,000 guns are stolen each year. You would think that gun manufacturers would seize on Smart Guns as creating an endless demand for their product — like Apple smartphones.
Besides stolen guns, “In 2013 alone, more than 500 people lost their lives to gun accidents –— and that includes 30 children younger than five years old,” the president said at a moving speech Jan. 5 in the White House announcing his executive orders. “In the greatest, most technologically advanced nation on Earth, there is no reason for this. We need to develop new technologies that make guns safer. If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?
If there’s an app that can help us find a missing tablet if we can do it for your iPad, there’s no reason we can’t do it with a stolen gun. If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull a trigger on a gun. Right? So we’re going to advance research. We’re going to work with the private sector to update firearms technology.”
During the town hall he noted that as far back in 1997, Colt and Smith & Wesson developed technology that limited the use of the gun to its owner, but “they were attacked by the NRA as ‘surrendering.’
“Now, to me, this does not make sense. If you are a gun owner, I would think that you would at least want a choice so that if you wanted to purchase a firearm that could only be used by you — in part to avoid accidents in your home, in part to make sure that if it’s stolen, it’s not used by a criminal, in part, if there’s an intruder, you pull the gun but somehow it gets wrested away from you, that gun can’t be turned on you and used on you — I would think there might be a market for that.”
He noted, “There’s nothing else in our lives that we purchase where we don’t try to make it a little safer if we can..or the notion that anything we do to try to make them safer is somehow a plot to take away guns, that contradicts what we do to try to create a better life for Americans in every other area of our lives.”
But there is something that the federal government can do without new law-making. “As the single largest purchaser of firearms in the country, the federal government has a unique opportunity to advance this research and ensure that smart gun technology becomes a reality — and it is possible to do so in a way that makes the public safer and is consistent with the Second Amendment.”
The U.S. government could insert into its RFPs that the guns it buys have smart-gun technology (then ISIS couldn’t simply take over American-made weapons arsenal), which then could provide the template for commercial guns.
Background checks already exist – and in fact universal background checks are favored by close to 90 percent of Americans including the vast majority of Republicans, gun owners and even NRA members.
All Obama is doing is calling for steps to make the background check system more efficient and effective.
In 2015, NICS received more than 22.2 million background check requests, an average of more than 63,000 per day.
By law, a gun dealer can complete a sale to a customer if the background check comes back clean or has taken more than three days to complete.
But features of the current system, which was built in the 1990s, are outdated.
Obama is directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take steps to ensure National Instant Background Check System operates more efficiently and effectively to keep guns out of the wrong hands: hiring 230 additional NICS examiners and other staff to assist processing the mandatory background checks (an increase of 50 percent); partnering with the U.S. Digital Service to modernize NICS, to make the system more efficient and effective, and make it available 24/7, in order to complete them within the mandatory three-day period. (24/7 – how convenient for gun purchasers!).
Contrary to the reflexive claim that nothing that Obama proposed would have prevented the most high-profile mass murders, enforcing the law by hiring more ATF agents to undertake the background check within the mandatory three-day period may well have prevented Charleston murderer Dylann Roof from getting his gun, or better identified a straw purchaser (such as Enrique Marquez purchasing two assault weapons for the San Bernardino killers), or prevented Jared Loughner from getting the guns he used to assassinate six and injure 13 including Congresswoman Gabby Giffords at a Tucson shopping center, or Seung-Hui Cho from murderering 32 at Virginia Tech.
Yet, Congress has reduced funding for the agency.
So if Congress believes that it is only necessary to enforce existing laws, there should be no qualm about hiring more officers.
Mental illness.
After every massacre and the obligatory “thoughts and prayers,” Republicans consistently divert focus from gun safety to mental illness, but never actually do anything about it — because they are more concerned about a veteran with PTSD not being able to have a gun. Well they shouldn’t have a gun. Tell that to Taya Kyle, the widow of ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle, who astonishingly was at the town hall to oppose any gun regulation when her own husband was murdered by a vet with PTSD.
Obama is calling for a new $500 million investment to increase access to mental health care; the Social Security Administration has indicated that it will begin the rulemaking process to include information in the background check system about beneficiaries who are prohibited from possessing a firearm for mental health reasons’ and the Department of Health and Human Services is finalizing a rule to remove unnecessary legal barriers preventing states from reporting relevant information about people prohibited from possessing a gun for specific mental health reasons. (Chris Christie vetoed legislation passed unanimously that would require reporting of anyone with mental illness who seeks to purge the record for the purpose of purchasing a gun. So much for caring about New Jerseyans.)
And as Obama noted, two-thirds of the more than 30,000 gun deaths each year are suicides.
But what is absolutely clear if you actually look at what Obama is proposing is that there is nothing that prevents the so-called law abiding citizen from obtaining a gun — if anything, it expedites it. Everything he has proposed is designed to keep guns out of the hands of people who everyone agrees should not have guns. Everything he has proposed is already in the law – but has not been properly enforced.
Obama noted that right to own a gun might be mentioned in Second Amendment, but other amendments are important too, and all are limited in some way — free speech (you can’t yell fire), free press (reporters prosecuted for revealing states secrets), privacy (still can be searched at airports).
“All of us should be able to work together to find a balance that declares the rest of our rights are also important — Second Amendment rights are important, but there are other rights that we care about as well. And we have to be able to balance them.
Because our right to worship freely and safely –- that right was denied to Christians in Charleston, South Carolina. And that was denied Jews in Kansas City. And that was denied Muslims in Chapel Hill, and Sikhs in Oak Creek. They had rights, too.
“Our right to peaceful assembly — that right was robbed from moviegoers in Aurora and Lafayette. Our unalienable right to life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — those rights were stripped from college students in Blacksburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine, and from first-graders in Newtown. First-graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun.” Obama teared up at that point.
To be sure, free speech is limited when you are confronted by gun-wielding people in a town hall, or who infiltrate a Black Lives Matter protest.
His modest initiative can’t solve all gun violence, but as Obama pointed out, with more than 30,000 gun deaths each year (and 40 percent more gun deaths in a state like Missouri after it relaxed gun control measures), even reducing that number by a small percentage means thousands of lives, tens of thousands of people who might otherwise live out their lives with injuries, thousands of families, who are not subjected to such horror. Of course, we would know more about how to address this public health menace of gun violence if the CDC were not legally barred from conducting research.
“How did we get to the place where people think requiring a comprehensive background check means taking away people’s guns?” Obama asked. “Each time this comes up, we are fed the excuse that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that, so why bother trying. I reject that thinking. We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.
“And the evidence tells us that in states that require background checks, law-abiding Americans don’t find it any harder to purchase guns whatsoever. Their guns have not been confiscated. Their rights have not been infringed…
“But think about this. When it comes to an inherently deadly weapon — nobody argues that guns are potentially deadly — weapons that kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, Congress actually voted to make it harder for public health experts to conduct research into gun violence; made it harder to collect data and facts and develop strategies to reduce gun violence.
Even after San Bernardino, they’ve refused to make it harder for terror suspects who can’t get on a plane to buy semi-automatic weapons. That’s not right. That can’t be right.
“So the gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage right now, but they cannot hold America hostage. We do not have to accept this carnage as the price of freedom.
“Now, I want to be clear. Congress still needs to act…Because once Congress gets on board with common-sense gun safety measures we can reduce gun violence a whole lot more. But we also can’t wait. Until we have a Congress that’s in line with the majority of Americans, there are actions within my legal authority that we can take to help reduce gun violence and save more lives — actions that protect our rights and our kids.”
He compared the courage of Zaevion Dobson, a sophomore at Fulton High School in Knoxville, Tenn., to the cowardice of elected officials who are charged with protecting lives.
When guns started blazing in his neighborhood as he was playing video games, this 15-year old “dove on top of three girls to shield them from the bullets. And he was shot in the head. And the girls were spared. He gave his life to save theirs –- an act of heroism a lot bigger than anything we should ever expect from a 15-year-old…
“We are not asked to do what Zaevion Dobson did. We’re not asked to have shoulders that big; a heart that strong; reactions that quick. I’m not asking people to have that same level of courage, or sacrifice, or love. But if we love our kids and care about their prospects, and if we love this country and care about its future, then we can find the courage to vote. We can find the courage to get mobilized and organized. We can find the courage to cut through all the noise and do what a sensible country would do.”
It is so sad that President Obama has to walk such a fine line. There are so many more important things that should be done if elected officials truly see their role as protecting public safety as their most significant mission.
Banning assault weapons, restricting the size of ammo clips, restricting (like prescription medicine) how many guns or how much ammo can be purchased at a time, taxing purchases of guns and ammo to fund victims of violence, requiring gun purchasers to take training and pass licensing exams, requiring regular renewal of gun registration (like cars), requiring gun purchasers to take out liability insurance, removing the unparalleled immunity from prosecution that gun manufacturers enjoy, unshackling doctors from discussing safe storage of guns in the home with parents, making parents legally liable if their guns are used by their child, and seeing gun violence for what it is: a public health epidemic.
Read for yourself what Obama is actually proposing. The executive action measures are detailed in the “FACT SHEET: New Executive Actions to Reduce Gun Violence and Make Our Communities Safer” (www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/04/fact-sheet-new-executive-actions-reduce-gun-violence-and-make-our)
