During CNN’s town hall for President Obama to discuss his executive orders on gun control, there will be one guest that knows the horrors of gun violence all too well, but remains adamantly supportive of the 2nd Amendment.
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“If the goal is to save lives, then prosecute criminals, Mr. President!” another tweet read.
“Historically, many in the Republican Party were in favor of background checks, and what’s changed is not that my propels are particularly radical”, Obama said at the CNN town hall. And if the 90 percent of Americans who do support common-sense gun reforms join me, we will elect the leadership we deserve. “They’re just down the street”.
“Even as I continue to take every action possible as president, I will also take every action I can as a citizen”, he said in an opinion column published by the New York Times. “And if you make it hard for them to win an election if they block those laws, they’ll change course, I promise you”.
It took Anderson Cooper’s prodding about the amorphous sense of gun-rights advocates that Obama’s true intent is to ultimately take people’s guns away for the President to drop his professorial persona and turn angry. Obama took questions from Taya Kyle, whose late husband was depicted in the film “American Sniper”, and Cleo Pendleton, whose daughter was shot and killed near Obama’s Chicago home.
“Since this is a main reason they exist, you’d think that they’d be prepared to have a debate with the president”, Obama said.
The relevant portion of the transcript from CNN’s Guns in America: Obama Town Hall on January 7 can be found below. Last year, following a series of mass shootings, Obama pledged to “politicize” the issue to try to level the playing field for gun-control supporters.
At the very time the nation is finally waking up to the dangers of unfettered gun distribution and President Barack Obama is looking for ways to take executive action, the wannabe Buckeroos of the Wild West (mainly Republican legislators) have overturned an 1871 state law prohibiting the open carry of firearms.
Obama renewed his push for gun regulations following a spree of mass shootings previous year, including a one orchestrated by a radicalized Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California, in December in which 14 people died. The New Jersey Institute of Technology has already patented such technology, but the Institute’s Bill Marshall says no gun maker’s been interested. While private gun sales can be conducted over the Internet, if the sale involves people in different states, a licensed gun dealer in the state where the gun is going still has to be involved in the transfer.
“We have to protect the Second Amendment”, Trump told CNN.
He tried to reassure gun owners that he is not trying to take away their firearms, and accused the NRA of pushing an “imaginary fiction” about his actions.
That massacre, though, crystallized the gun battle in Obama’s mind – and shows why he’ll never drop it, no matter the politics. “If I screwed up, I wasn’t at risk of getting shot”, he said. Obama did not say how much faster he wants the reporting to be or how he would achieve that.
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The American Firearms Retailers Association, another lobby group that represents gun dealers, did participate Thursday. “There’s nothing we’ve proposed that would make it harder for you to purchase a firearm”. Warren Burger, the arch-conservative Supreme Court justice appointed by Richard Nixon, in an interview in 1991 described the then-new idea of an individual right to bear arms as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime”.
