President Barack Obama answers questions during a CNN televised town hall meeting at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Thursday, Jan. 7, 2016.
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Obama said he’s always been willing to meet with the NRA to discuss gun policies – if they’re willing to address the facts truthfully. There are 9/11 truthers, who claim the attacks were an inside job; Sandy Hook truthers, who say the 2012 massacre of schoolchildren was staged to create support for gun control; JFK assassination truthers who think Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. Roughly 100 people were invited to attend. The session was held at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.
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. The ruling-class elite and their puppets (like President Barack Obama and many others) continue to work in concert to concentrate power and wealth in their hands.
“I support increasing mental health services and closing the gun purchase background check loophole in order to help reduce gun violence in our communities and needless deaths in emergency rooms”, he said in a statement.
President Barack Obama said on Thursday that he will not campaign for Democrats who don’t back gun reforms, part of his effort to make tougher gun laws a cause in the November 2016 presidential and congressional elections. “And if the 90 percent of Americans who do support common-sense gun reforms join me, we will elect the leadership we deserve”.
Critics accuse Obama of infringing on their constitutional right to bear arms.
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.
“I think he’s appealing to people’s anxieties and insecurities and even outright fears in an attempt to win votes for his presidential campaign”, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
“In no way would I criticize Obama for taking action”, she said.
The president, on Thursday, acknowledged that his executive actions won’t stop all gun violence or gun-related crime, but said that if even 2,000 – of the more than 30,000 people nationwide who are killed by gun violence every year – are saved he would consider the actions a success. “You certainly would like to make it a little harder for that assailant to have also had a gun”, he said.
The National Rifle Association sees no reason to participate in a public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House.
On Tuesday, Obama said he had taken a series of actions meant to expand the number of people who undergo criminal background checks when purchasing firearms, by clarifying that existing laws require anyone making a living off the sale of guns to conduct the checks.
By the afternoon, the idea that Obama had faked being upset when he spoke about the brutal murder of small children – children whose families he met on an individual basis not long after the shootings – had made it to the mainstream.
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Rep. Raul Ruiz of California’s 36th District, which includes the Coachella Valley, said he supports the executive actions, despite the way in which they were instituted.
