“Hillary Clinton is, I think, worse than Obama on the issue, frankly, she wants to take everyone’s gun away”, he said.
Advertisement
“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.
A new CNN/ORC poll released Thursday found that 67 percent of Americans back the president’s executive actions on guns, while 32 percent oppose them.
The televised debate featured questions from gun owners, some of whom were wary that Obama planned to revoke the right to ownership of the some 350 million firearms in private hands in the United States.
Obama has struggled to toughen gun restrictions during his presidency, even after a string of mass shootings left more than 400 people dead in 2015. The policies were a result of discussions the president had earlier this week with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director.
But the majority of Americans-54 percent-are against Obama using executive actions to advance his measures, while only 44 percent support his use of executive power. He called on Congress to set up a system that is “efficient” and doesn’t inconvenience lawful gun owners to create a background check system that would stem at least some illegal gun activity.
Taking questions from a partisan audience that included Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu and Taya Kyle, the widow of sniper Chris Kyle, Obama said much of the polorisation on gun ownership came down to differences between rural and inner city communities.
“I would hope that would agree with that”, he said.
“If anything we’re speeding up the access to it for people who are legally entitled to get a gun”, Biden told Roanoke station WDBJ, which lost two employees to a shooting while they worked on the air previous year.
Trump said Obama’s tears were real.
“The way it is described, is that we are trying to take away everybody’s guns”, Obama said.
“This just makes it a little harder for the people who are buying between friends”, said Andrew Sypien, with Defender Outdoors.
“The American Legion strongly believes that treatment for [post-traumatic stress disorder] or depression by itself, which a number of wartime veterans experience, should not be the sole factor in denying a veteran the right to purchase a firearm”, said American Legion National Commander Dale Barnett.
Advertisement
Subverting the institutionalized protection of the gun industry will be a long process, Obama wrote, but it’s long overdue – and none of the great pieces of legislation, he suggested, have come easy.
