A day after Governor Andrew Cuomo signed New York’s groundbreaking gun legislation (Cuomo followed that with a ceremonial signing of the legislation at Rochester City Hall this morning), President Obama unveiled his own recommendations for reducing gun violence in America. He made three main recommendations to Congress.
Topping his list is enacting universal background checks for people purchasing guns. Currently, as many as 40 percent of the guns purchased in the US are sold without background checks, he said.
“You should at least have to show that you’re not a felon,” Obama said.
His second recommendation is to restore the ban on assault weapons with high-capacity magazines. Obama referred to a similar request President Ronald Reagan made in a letter to Congress in 1994.
Third, Obama asked Congress to crack down on people who buy guns for the purpose of getting them into the hands of criminals — so called “straw man” purchases.
The president also spoke about funding research into the study of violent video games and their link to behavior.
“We don’t benefit from ignorance,” Obama said.
And he recommended putting more police on the street and in city neighborhoods.
The relatively short speech was an appeal to the American public to not let the momentum for change slip away. The only way Congress will act is if the American public demands it, Obama said.
And he tried to chip away at the bedrock argument concerning the Second Amendment, acknowledging that Americans have the right to bear arms.
“With rights come responsibilities,” Obama said. “We don’t live in isolation. We live in a society.”
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This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2013.
I’ll bet Cuomo is kicking himself for not including little children in his photo-op signing of his gun control law. Obama beat him to it!
I’ll bet Cuomo is kicking himself for not having children at his photo-op for signing his gun control law. Obama beat him to it!
“We don’t benefit from ignorance,” Obama said.
To the contrary, Obama has benefited enormously from the ignorance of large segments of the populace (to say nothing of the lamestream media’s compliant and quite willful ignorance).
“Topping his list is enacting universal background checks for people purchasing guns. Currently, as many as 40 percent of the guns purchased in the US are sold without background checks, he said. “
GIGO, as they say. This is the kind of stuff a reporter should look into. It’s not that hard.
“The dubious statistic of guns that avoided background checks — which is actually 36 percent — comes from a small 251-person survey on gun sales two decades ago, very early in the Clinton administration. Most of the survey covered sales before the Brady Act instituted mandatory federal background checks in early 1994.
If that alone didn’t make the number invalid, the federal survey simply asked buyers if they thought they were buying from a licensed firearms dealer. While all Federal Firearm Licensees do background checks, only those perceived as being FFLs were counted. Yet, there is much evidence that survey respondents who went to the smallest FFLs, especially the “kitchen table” types, had no idea that the dealer was actually “licensed.” Many buyers seemed to think that only “brick and mortar” stores were licensed dealers, and so the survey underestimating the number of sales covered by the checks.
Another reason for the high number is that it includes guns transferred as inheritances or as gifts from family members. Even President Obama’s background proposal excludes almost all of those transfers.
If you look at guns that were bought, traded, borrowed, rented, issued as a requirement of the job, or won through raffles, 85 percent went through Federal Firearm Licensees and would have been subject to a background check. Only 15 percent would have been transferred without a background check.”
So lets’a have a real conversation, one that starts with facts. Not unexamined repetition of fiction.