Call me a big supporter of gun control … I love hitting my target. I’m also up on gun safety – when not shooting, action open, magazine out! So, you can imagine how much I was looking forward to hearing what President Barack Obama had to say about “gun safety” last week.
He said plenty, about very little. As Bowdoin College professor Andrew Rudalevige opined in the Washington Post, Obama’s “moves are made up of about half departmental action and half exhortations to enforce existing law.”
Obama’s most significant effort seems to be a change in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) “Privacy Rule” regulations. The new rule reads that those “determined by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority to be a danger to themselves or others or to lack the mental capacity to contract or manage their own affairs, as a result of marked subnormal intelligence or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease” can now be reported to the gun background check system as subject to a “federal mental health prohibitor.”
Nobody wants dangerous nuts to have guns, of course, but what about senior citizens under fiscal guardianship, and what exactly is “other lawful authority?”
President Obama also declared “anybody in the business of selling firearms must get a license and conduct background checks or be subject to criminal prosecutions.” The White House also sent out a tweet claiming a “violent felon can buy the exact same weapon over the Internet with no background check, no questions asked.” Sure kids, just try it.
As for being “in the business,” the ATF issued a “guidance document” on Dec. 18 that says a Federal Firearms License (FFL) is required of persons who “repetitively buy and sell firearms with the principal motive of making a profit.” And by the way, the guidance specifies it “has no regulatory effect.”
Have you been to a gun show and seen the prices asked by our repetitive “private sellers?” If you want a profit, it really helps to sell something once in a blue moon.
President Obama also promised the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security would “boost gun safety technology,” pandering to a long-standing obsession of anti-gunners, “smart guns.” While great in theory, a “smart enough” gun doesn’t yet exist. The only smart gun available for market today is the Armatix, a 22 rimfire German pipsqueak that requires the user to wear a tacky digital “watch.” Um, no thanks.
There’s lots more, but frankly, the president’s actions didn’t match his teary histrionics. Even the usually-gun-phobic Associated Press had to report Obama’s initiatives “would have had no impact in keeping weapons from the hands of suspects in several of the deadliest recent mass shootings that have spurred calls for tighter gun control.”
In other words, President Obama picked the wrong target – and it seems that no matter the script, Americans are figuring it out. In mid-December, ABC News/Washington Post polls taken after the San Bernardino terrorist slaughter revealed a long-term, steady decline in public support for another pet cause of gun-haters, banning “assault weapons” – or as they are properly known, Modern Sporting Rifles.
In 1994, the year the “assault weapons ban” and Brady Bill passed, ABC’s polling respondents supported a ban, 80 percent to 18 percent. After the next election, of course, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952.
Today, the same polling firm finds a majority of poll respondents oppose a black-rifle ban, 53 over 45 percent. Even worse for the gun grabbers, pollsters found that 47 percent over 42 favored “encouraging more people to carry guns” over “stricter gun control” as a “better response to terrorism.”
ABC noted the poll trends leave only seven demographics still in favor of a ban: “[W]omen, Northeasterners, seniors, post-graduates, liberals, Democrats and blacks.” What about young adults – future voters that many experts expect to trend toward the Democratic side? “[N]early six in 10 young adults oppose it.”
President Obama needs to understand this.