Mr Obama has “answered the calls of moms, gun violence survivors, community leaders and every day advocates across the country who worked tirelessly to support the President in taking meaningful action to prevent gun violence”, said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
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“We understand that we won’t be able to stop all mass shootings or any single shooting”, said Mueller.
“Barack Obama is obsessed with undermining the Second Amendment, an important protection our Constitution recognizes and defends for us”, Rubio said.
“The problem is that some gun sellers have been operating by a different set of rules”, he said. The president was moved to tears in an unusually emotional display during his announcement, saying “it gets me mad” every time he thinks about the 20 first-graders who were killed in the mass shooting at a CT elementary school in December 2012. Some unknown but likely significant percentage of gun transactions don’t involve a federally licensed dealer, and hence aren’t accompanied by a background check at all.
Under the changes, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is issuing guidelines meant to narrow exceptions to a system that requires sellers to check with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine whether buyers have criminal records, are charged with crimes or have mental health conditions that would bar them from owning a gun. “It made people want to carry and want to be more alarmed of what could happen”, said Bowman.
Still, Obama’s action is expected to require hundreds more background checks per year.
In November, Booker joined his colleagues in a letter calling on Obama to utilize his executive authority to reduce gun violence.
“The rights of law-abiding gun owners have never been under greater attack than they are today from this administration”, Dunn said in a statement.
Baltimore County Police Chief Jim Johnson, who chairs the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence, said he supports the President’s plan, which he called “reasonable”. “We maybe can’t save everybody, but we could save some”.
Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head at a political event in Arizona on January 8, 2011, was also in attendance, as were relatives of victims from the June 2015 Charleston, S.C., church shooting.
They watched and listened as the President talked to the nation, now wanting to expand background checks for online and gun show sales and add more mental health treatment and research into gun safety technology.
The president vowed to take action hoping these measures will save lives.
The NRA is expected to challenge Obama’s executive actions in court.
In Congress, Democrats and Republicans similarly lined up on opposite sides. With these unconstitutional executive orders, President Obama has once again ignored the separation of powers and disregarded the rule of law.
Ryan said Obama’s words and actions “amount to a form of intimidation that undermines liberty”.
The President’s steps are limited and modest in scope, the result of legal limitations of what he can accomplish without having to go through gridlocked Congress. After Newtown, Obama sought far-reaching, bipartisan legislation that went beyond background checks.
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Neal Dunn, a Republican running for Congress in District 2, said the president’s “unilateral executive actions show the disdain he has for the Second Amendment”. A more recent spate of gun-related atrocities, including in San Bernardino, California, shootings have spurred the administration to give the issue another look.
