President Obama’s mission to address gun violence in America began on Friday, December 31st, New Year’s Eve. Obama released his regular recorded Saturday address earlier than usual. In it was a clear message that he would forge ahead and do something – anything – to make it harder for potential killers to buy firearms. He had tried – and failed – to tighten gun laws after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school.This week, frustrated by inaction and just a few weeks after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, Obama made his move. He invoked executive power, bypassing Congress, to address loopholes in background checks for gun sales. That was followed by a press conference to officially unveil his executive actions in which the president, uncharacteristically emotional, shed tears. Two days later, he was live on television at a town hall on gun control hosted by CNN. He capped the week by writing an opinion column, “Barack Obama: Guns Are Our Shared Responsibility,” published in the New York Times.
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Presidential Tears, Executive Actions and a Townhall
Republicans’ Do-nothingness on Guns
It is one thing to be in the pocket of the National Rifle Association. It is another to do nothing and then assume a superior posture of purposeful neglect, as though do-nothingness were a policy and smug intransigence a philosophy
New Year Starts With Fight Over Gun Control
President Barack Obama got right back to work after his holiday break with gun control on his mind. At a meeting Monday with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and other top law enforcement officials, the president was briefed on proposals designed to crack down on unregulated gun sales. Later in the week, CNN will host Obama for a live town hall meeting on the issue, which was brought home vividly just last month when 14 people were massacred by a heavily armed young Muslim-American couple during mass shooting in California. Republican presidential hopefuls immediately hammered Obama’s move to invoke executive power – that is, to enact the laws without Congressional approval. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called the president a “petulant child,” while frontrunner Donald Trump vowed to use HIS future executive power to overturn Obama’s.
Like Big Tobacco, Big Guns Should Pay for the Damage It Causes
The time has come for another major industry, the $43 billion firearms and ammunition business, to recognize the damage its products are doing to American citizens and to begin compensation to individuals who have been harmed, as well as to the social institutions that bear an unfair burden because of the actions of a few.
A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths
What we need is an evidence-based public health approach — the same model we use to reduce deaths from other potentially dangerous things around us, from swimming pools to cigarettes. We’re not going to eliminate guns in America, so we need to figure out how to coexist with them.