In short, that’s because the conditions he is changing by executive action are murkier than he made them out to be.
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Senator Ted Cruz, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, emailed supporters an image of the president in combat uniform, complete with helmet, claiming “Obama wants your guns”.
In a primetime, televised forum, the president dismissed what he called a “conspiracy” alleging that the government – and Mr Obama in particular – wants to seize all firearms as a precursor to imposing martial law. “Obama singled out the National Rifle Association as one of the “loudest, shrillest voices” against gun control and told the audience “[that] the way we break the deadlock on this issue is when the NRA doesn’t have a stranglehold on Congress in this debate”.
“This notion of a conspiracy out there… it gets wrapped up in concerns about the federal government, there’s a long history of that”, Obama said. When would I have started on this enterprise?”Obama defended his support for the constitutional right to gun ownership while arguing it was consistent with his efforts to curb mass shootings”. “Why can’t your administration see that these restrictions that you are putting make it harder for me to own a gun?”
The President will join CNN’s Anderson Cooper at George Mason University just outside of Washington for the event where Obama hopes to engage with people who fall on both sides of the gun debate.
He scoffed at the NRA for skipping the televised forum and said the White House had invited the group to meetings many times, to no avail. At a town hall event hosted by CNN that night, he explained why.
“There’s a reason why the NRA’s not here”.
Despite those shifts toward the positive in reviews of Obama’s handling of gun laws, most Americans say they oppose Obama’s use of executive actions to make these changes, 54 percent oppose it, while just 44 percent support that mode of action.
The White House portrays the NRA, the nation’s largest gun group, as possessing a disproportionate influence over politicians that has prevented new gun laws despite polls that show broad support for measures like universal background checks.
After last year’s mass shooting at an OR college that left 10 dead, a visibly angry and frustrated Obama complained “we have become numb to this”.
But it also served a objective that White House officials said they wanted: to let Obama respond to what he believes are incorrect or misleading arguments about his positions.
He also challenged America’s most prominent pro-gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, for not taking part in the event.
Instead, Obama announced modest measures Tuesday to reduce gun violence in absence of congressional action.
Still, questions were raised on the effectiveness of his proposals, which include an executive order clarifying the definition of who is in the business of selling guns and therefore subject to licensing and to performing background checks on gun buyers.
Obama, who said he never owned a gun in his life, added that 30,000 people are killed each year by guns.
He took questions from Taya Kyle, whose late husband, shooting victim Chris Kyle, was depicted in the film American Sniper.
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President Barack Obama took on the issue of gun reform again at a town hall meeting on CNN Thursday evening, saying that while he respected the Second Amendment the gun sales need to be regulated to ensure the safety of Americans.
