Obama considers executive action on gun background checks

As he travels to Roseburg, Ore., to console grieving families, President Obama is mulling further executive actions to limit access to guns. “You know, there’s no possible discussion and it’s for political purposes. I understand we’re in full support of Second Amendment, but that doesn’t mean we don’t regulate our firearms”, Anderson said.

Many of us Westporters who are not gun owners feel as helpless as he does. Yet such bad numbers never add up to legislation that might curb the carnage, so strong is the pro-gun lobby and so deep-rooted the belief among many Americans that they have a “God-given right” to own weapons.

A third overarching problem with Obama’s executive order is the fact that the Second Amendment protects natural rights relating to gun ownership and self-defense. However, a notable bill, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 that would have gone beyond Obama’s initial efforts, failed to gain the support from both congressional Republicans and Democrats it would have needed in order to become law.

The action would reportedly not apply to people who occasionally sell, exchange, or purchase guns for their personal collection or anyone who sells off all or parts of their personal firearm collection.

His staff came up with the background check expansion idea after Congress rejected legislation to expand them to private sellers in 2013.

According to Mother Jones, out of the 143 guns used in mass shootings from 1982 to 2012, more than three quarters were obtained legally.

The plan, which is among a handful various Democrats have announced in the wake of the October 1 shooting, calls for making “straw purchasing” and gun trafficking federal crimes, barring domestic abusers from buying guns and requiring complete background checks on all sales.

So what’s on Obama’s executive action agenda that will presumably stop the gun violence?

Yet meaningful gun reform would have the potential to take the most deadly tools of violence away from perpetrators. We are well past that now, and it is time we start acting as if we had a few common sense. Bishop Miles is a leader in the Industrial Areas Foundation’s (IAF) national network of interfaith, interracial community organizations. But I am sick and exhausted of the constant gun massacres in our country. No one, except those who make their living off just such acts: gun manufacturers, gun rights militias and the NRA. The NRA has succeeded in boosting gun sales beyond all reasonable expectations for their arms industry supporters, and whipped those who have been economically exploited by that unholy alliance into believing that their guns are going to be taken away so they had better hoard guns and ammunition today.

“This is a super-complicated policy”, one administration official familiar with Obama’s proposals told NBC.