Obama Goes it Alone on Gun Control
The Radical-in-Chief ignores the Constitution and the Jihadist threat.
January 6, 2016
Joseph Klein
Wiping away tears that eluded him when he spoke about the jihadist massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, President Obama condemned congressional inaction in the face of gun violence during remarks he delivered from the East Room of the White House on Tuesday morning. The president vowed to fill in the void through executive action. The most egregious of these measures is a wholesale re-writing of the definition of what constitutes a “seller” in order to extend the reach of federal government control over all gun owners. Obama listed this as his top priority action, ahead of what he described as “smart and effective enforcement of gun safety laws that are already on the books.”
Enforcing the laws already on the books is the responsibility of the executive branch. Making new laws or changing existing laws is the responsibility of the legislative branch.
Apparently, President Obama has learned nothing from the Supreme Court’s reversal of his unconstitutional recess appointments and the judicial stay issued against his unconstitutional immigration amnesty executive orders. Obama gave little comfort to skeptics when he claimed in his White House remarks that “I believe in the Second Amendment. It’s there written on the paper.”
The problem is that Obama believes the Constitution is only just a piece of paper, which he can erase and then use the blank page to write his own rules of governance. After all, this is the same man who complained years ago that the Constitution says “what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
As president, Obama has gone even further, railing against the separation of powers. If Congress does not act the way he thinks it should, he will just proceed all by himself. In his mind, he is doing something he must on behalf of the American people right now, while the “gun lobby” is holding Congress “hostage.”
As usual, President Obama raised strawman arguments to justify his latest power grab.
For example, Obama claimed in his East Room remarks announcing his gun control executive actions that “we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency. It doesn't happen in other advanced countries. It’s not even close.”
Obama’s claim is misleading.
First of all, we do not have complete data from countries such as China and Russia to draw any meaningful conclusions. Secondly, raw total numbers of mass shootings tell less in terms of real comparisons than normalizing the numbers utilizing some constant unit of population. According to a
study conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which compared annual death rates per million people from mass public shootings between the United States and European countries from 2009 to mid-2015, the United States ranks 9th. The United States has the same ranking when comparing the frequency of mass public shootings during the same time period. This data, by the way, was compiled before the deadly jihadist mass shootings in Paris that claimed 130 lives last November.
Moreover, deaths in general that have occurred as a result of gun violence have declined sharply during the last twenty years. According to a
Pew Research Center analysis of death certificate data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “The nation’s overall gun death rate has declined 31% since 1993.” President Obama is deliberately distorting the scope of the problem to convince Americans that we are facing an urgent crisis which he must address immediately to resolve.
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Obama Goes it Alone on Gun Control
