Obama: Last Year in Office Will Be One of ‘Sustained Attention’ to Gun Control
Written by
AWR Hawkins Published: 17 November 2015
On November 17 GQ magazine published an interview with President Obama in which he indicated his last year in office will be one of “sustained attention” to gun control.
Obama said Americans have a habit of paying attention to a heinous crime for “48 [or] 72 hours” then just moving on, and he is going to try to keep them focused on gun control for longer than that during his final year.
According to GQ, Obama is examining options for using executive actions to secure more gun control. He pointed to executive actions he took in 2013 as a precedent for the ones he hopes to take in the coming 14 months.
Obama said:
Keep in mind that after Sandy Hook, we put forward 23 executive actions. So we haven’t been asleep at the switch in terms of executive actions that we’ve tried. There are maybe a few more that had to be scrubbed by lawyers because, essentially, with every executive action, we can count on it being challenged by somebody in Congress or, in this case, the NRA. We want to make any executive action we take as defensible as possible legally.
This is very telling, and it confirms earlier CBS News reports that Obama currently has a team of “White House lawyers” scouring laws to find places and ways in which he can use executive action to expand background checks without Congressional approval.
Obama told GQ that until more gun control is implemented, “tragedies” like the mass shootings at Sandy Hook and in other gun free zones around the country will continue to happen. But Obama did not the mention that the attackers in the vast majority of all those tragedies passed background checks to acquire their guns. In other words, the mass attackers are already meeting the requirement that Obama is pushing as a solution to crime.
The exceptions are those who steal their guns–like the Sandy Hook gunman. And for those determined to steal their weapons, no amount of gun control will prove sufficient.
But Obama is searching for ways to expand gun control and says he will “make sure that there’s a sustained attention paid to [it].”