Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt five years ago, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post supporting the Obama administration’s latest executive actions on gun violence:
The president’s reasonable proposal addresses a lethal problem: People who are in the business of selling guns can avoid the current requirement to conduct background checks on their buyers by claiming not to be gun dealers. Go to a gun show, for example, and in booths right next to licensed gun dealers whose customers have to undergo background checks, you will see others who operate outside of the rules, selling dozens or hundreds of the same guns each year without background checks.
The steps announced this week will narrow that gap by requiring anyone who sells a significant number of guns or operates like a commercial dealer to get a license and require each buyer to pass a criminal background check. Truly private sales, such as simply selling a gun to a neighbor or a friend, will not be affected. But, based on analysis by the gun-violence-prevention organization I co-founded, millions of firearms transactions that currently happen with no questions asked will be subject to background checks.
The president’s proposal makes another key improvement: It addresses the weakness in the background-check system that authorities say allowed a dangerous man to buy a gun and murder nine innocent people in a Charleston, S.C., church. It does this by making the system more efficient and effective, including by increasing the number of background-check examiners and related staff members by 50 percent and reporting which states do and don’t provide essential background-check records to the FBI.
Other important provisions will require gun dealers to report lost and stolen guns, making it easier for law enforcement to crack down on the illegal gun trade; and will increase investment in gun safety technology and mental-health treatment. These are just common sense.
Almost three years ago, when a minority of senators caved in to their fear of the corporate gun lobby and blocked sensible, bipartisan background-check legislation in Congress, I said that those senators had failed their constituents and, with every preventable gun death, made shame their legacy.
Many of those same senators, along with a lot of other elected officials and some candidates for president, will be quick to haul out the talking points the gun lobbyists in Washington gave them and attack the president’s reasonable action. They will warn of dire consequences and willfully spread misinformation. But the truth is this: These new steps will hurt no one, and they will protect many.
Around mile 32 of the bike ride I did in November, I almost gave up. I’m mostly paralyzed on my right side, and even though I had been training for months, my body was tired and it was hard to keep going. But I remembered my goal. I had a team of friends and supporters with me, so we just kept pedaling together. And then we crossed the finish line.
Reducing the number of Americans murdered or injured by guns is also not easy. It’s a long, hard haul.
But we cannot falter now, and we cannot wait for a Congress in the gun lobby’s grip to prevent any of the 12,000 gun murders that happen in our country every year.
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2016.
“But we cannot falter now, and we cannot wait for a Congress in the gun lobby’s grip to prevent any of the 12,000 gun murders that happen in our country every year. “
Even if it saves only one life, as the President said.
Wouldn’t that reasoning hold up regarding blocking the Syrian refugees?
Sure it would.
You’re dumb, Rat T
Well then I guess that makes two of us because I also saw the contradiction in the President’s statement. The rest of you must be in some state of denial.
Jim Nintzel, how many lives have actually been spared by the use of a fire arm each year? Is there any statistics any kind of gov’t data on the subject ? I believe that the number of would be innocent victims of crime, who have been spared from becoming a statistic, because of the use of a firearm will never be accurately determined. Is it possible that in the midst of a crowd, there was one person with a weapon strapped to his or her side and it prevented an attack from a would be assailant ? The heroic incident won’t air on the ‘5 o’clock news’ or be the subject at the water cooler at the office the following day. But I guess sometimes, somethings are better left unsaid.
Some are crying “bloody murder” over their second amendment rights. Well rights without regulation leads to anarchy. We can claim 2nd amendment rights to anything lethal drugs, firearms the list of good and bad can go on…. The more lethal the things you claim rights to, the heavier the regulation should be in the interest of our personal wellbeing and national/public safety.
Cicely, Liberals love their constitutional rights, but exercise extreme caution, as to whom they’re willing to share them with, would you agree ? I’m surprised the A.C.L.U. is not standing up for our constitutional right to bear arms. It seems as though they pick and choose , whom they will represent and if the agenda in question, is within liberal policy.
It appears to me that the blindfold on lady justice has temporarily been removed for the sake of Liberal policy and the scales which were formally used for justice, are found to be inadequate for use in the balance of judgement any longer.
Dave D, in answer to your question, roughly 2.5 million crimes a year are stopped by ordinary citizens using a firearm. And they have to fire their weapon less than 3% of the time.
Cicely, I have a question for you: Suppose you and the Marxist insurgency you are supporting (ignorantly or knowingly, as the case may be), win to your prize of civilian disarmament. It is not possible, because it would require an armed insurrection against our Constitutional form of government and we gun owners aren’t going to allow it, but let’s suppose for the sake of the argument. So all the firearms are magically dissolved into pixie dust or something. Then you are in your bed asleep at three a.m. and some 230-lb drug-addled fool crashes through your bedroom window with a baseball bat and a machete and starts swinging both at anything and anyone that moves. Tell me what you are going to do about it to prevent you, your significant other, and perhaps your children asleep in the next room to be turned into hamburger? If you cannot provide an effective defense that protects you and your family from a monster, then you have no damned business advocating the rest of us be disarmed.
Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly need to shut the hell up out of sheer embarrassment and respect for the fundamental principles of the first nation on the planet to be founded to preserve and protect the rights and liberties of the people superior to the arbitrary whim of kings and princes and neighborhood warlords and their wannabe surrogates and sycophants. They claim to be gun owners, yet they want everyone else disarmed. They claim to support the rights of the people to be unmolested by criminals, yet they want to give criminal free rein over a nation of victims. They claim to support the right to keep and bear arms, yet they advocate the destruction of the right by demanding people be required to ask government permission before they can exercise it. They claim the 2nd Amendment exists in a vacuum, yet they advocate the destruction of our 4th Amendment-guaranteed right to be secure from government interrogation and search when there is no probable cause of criminal conduct. They advocate the destruction of our 5th Amendment-guaranteed right to be secure from having our rights taken from us by government in the absence of due process by a Court of Law. They advocate the destruction of our 10th Amendment-guaranteed right to be secure from federal exercise of power not delegated by the Constitution of the United States, and State exercise of power prohibited by the Constitution of the United States. They are advocates of the destruction of our entire nation of liberty based on the Rule of Law structured by the aforementioned rights. They are, therefore, by definition, enemy agents and members of the Marxist insurgency currently trying to destroy our Constitution Republic. No one should give them the time of day.
Jarred Loughner and James E. Holmes would to me fit the definition of insanity but they both passed their background checks and another definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. King obamanation may have expanded background checks but they are still the same checks Jarred and James passed. So tell me who is insanest here?