“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”.
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At a campaign event in New Hampshire on Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said Obama was on a mission to undermine the rights guaranteed to Americans by the Constitution. “They’re just down the street”.
“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.
He added that it was invited to attend the forum, televised by CNN, but had declined to participate. I’m not necessarily saying that the two are correlated, but what I’m saying is that we’re at an all-time low for murder rate. Donald Trump has repeatedly accused Obama of “trying” to take citizens’ guns away, while a Ted Cruz campaign website featured a headline reading “Obama wants your guns” just this week.
KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS President Obama speaks to Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu during Thursday’s town hall meeting.
He dismissed such accusations as conspiracies, and that the notion that he would be paving the way for eventual martial law as absurd given that he didn’t have much time left in the White House.
Moderated by Anderson Cooper of CNN, the live question-and-answer session, with about 100 people in the audience, was billed by the network as a forum for advocates and opponents of gun rights.
President Obama defended steps he initiated this week aimed at reducing gun violence as a modest effort “just to make progress”, underscoring the limits of his new unilateral actions while vowing to seek more significant change through the ballot box.
Doing otherwise, the president said, would condemn the United States to continue suffering through mass shootings, suicides, gang violence, domestic abuse and accidental shootings that have killed tens of thousands of Americans.
Kyle argued that expanding background checks would do no good, particularly with regard to mass shootings, given that mass shooters often pass such checks. But Cooper raised the fact that Obama has spoken approvingly of Australian gun control measures, observing that things like this create distrust on the part of gun rights supporters in this country. “I’m only going to be here for another year”.
“We need a President who will stop threatening legal gun owners, & start tackling the root causes of violent crime & terrorism in this county”, the retired neurosurgeon tweeted. Fifty-three percent say they disapprove of Obama’s handling of gun policy in the new poll, while 43 percent approve. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in 2011, stood as her husband, Mark Kelly, asked Obama about confiscation theories. “All of us can agree that it makes sense to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of people who would do other people harm”.
Even as the President spoke, George Mason was tense over the possibility of armed protesters.
Before the event, Thomas Longo, the university’s police chief, said in an email to students and faculty members that some of the protesters outside the event were likely to be armed. At Thursday’s town hall, he referred to the Sandy Hook massacre as one of the worst days of his presidency.
“University police is aware of this and will have officers present to ensure that all protesters remain law-abiding and maintain the safety and well-being of Mason’s faculty, students and staff”, he continued. (This despite admitting that his wife would want a gun if she lived in a farmhouse in Iowa.) He also said that the point of his executive orders is to make it more hard for rapists to get guns, though he didn’t explain how that would work in any way that proved his point.
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The president said other industries, including automakers, medicine companies and makers of children’s toys have increased regulations and made improvements to make consumers safer.
