Cox says Obama is trying to distract from his lack of a strategy to prevent terrorist attacks in the U.S. He says Americans don’t need any more “emotional, condescending lectures that are completely devoid of facts”.
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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is making clear that it does not matter where you conduct your business-from a store, at gun shows, or over the Internet: If you are in the business of selling firearms, you must get a license and conduct background checks. They purposely seek to blur legal lines and intimidate individuals from exercising their right to buy or sell a firearm.
Studies show that every day where background checks are used, the system stops more than 170 felons, some 50 domestic abusers, and almost 20 fugitives from buying a gun.
Studies in the last decade have shown that criminals are more likely to get guns directly from friends or other social connections than at gun shows or flea markets.
Obama plainly cares deeply about gun violence, and most Americans share his sentiments.
National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre is seated for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence, on Capitol Hill in Washington January 30, 2013. But the overall effect on violence in the US could prove to be modest.
Gov. Chris Christie, who has been critical of President Barack Obama’s gun initiatives, is being asked to help to make them work.
The expansion of the background checks is somewhat similar to bipartisan legislation penned jointly by Sens.
On Twitter, Clinton thanked Obama for “taking a crucial step forward on gun violence”. As long as members of Congress continue to be owned by the NRA, the facts of violence around the gun issue will never substantially change. “The first step is fairly simple: We must enforce existing laws to keep guns of out the hands of violent criminals, rather than hampering the rights of law-abiding citizens”.
“These unconstitutional executive actions disregard the separation of powers and infringe on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans”, Coats says. The Obama administration acknowledged it couldn’t quantify how many gun sales would be newly subjected to background checks.
Driving new research into gun safety: The executive actions direct the Departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security to conduct or sponsor research into new technology to make firearms safer.
“President Obama talked about ‘the fierce urgency of now, ‘ quoting Martin Luther King, and, you know, it is time to act”, Lott says.
Elsewhere: In Congress, Democrats and Republicans similarly lined up on opposite sides.
Which doesn’t change the ugly fact that nothing the president has proposed – not the trivial gun-control actions he announced in that speech, nor anything else he’s put on the table in all his years in office – would have prevented Sandy Hook, or any of the other mass shootings of the Obama years.
“I think people misinterpret the action that took place today as something that is going to eventually lead to nobody being armed, which I don’t believe is the case at all”, Hart said. Still, some are calling on more action from Congress to increase regulations on guns.
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Leading US Republicans have as a result, denounced Obama for the move to tighten gun controls, with house of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan saying that the executive orders, bypass Congress, “undermine liberty” and would be challenged in court, the BBc adds. “Only Congress can really close the loopholes in the federal law, and the president is acting because Congress refuses to do so”.
