President Obama said Tuesday that the 30,000 people who are killed by guns each year justified his decision to take 10 new executive actions aimed at ensuring gun buyers can’t avoid federal background checks, and warned that the gun lobby can no longer hold the country hostage.
“Each time this comes up, we are fed the excuse that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that,” Obama said at the White House as he rolled out his actions. “So why bother trying?”
“I reject that thinking,” he said to applause.
Obama also rejected the idea that he’s looking to confiscate people’s guns. The White House has stressed this week that he worked to ensure his new actions were consistent with the Second Amendment, and Obama repeated that desire on Tuesday.
“This is not a plot to take away everybody’s guns,” he said. “You pass a background check, you purchase a firearm.”
“I believe in the Second Amendment; it is there written on the paper,” he said. “I taught constitutional law. I know a little something about it.”
At the same time, Obama said it’s time to stand up to the gun lobby to get legislative changes through Congress. He said gun purveyors and their advocates hold too much sway on Capitol Hill, which is why Congress did not pass a package of measures Obama proposed and worked with lawmakers on after Sandy Hook.
“The gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage right now, but they can’t hold America hostage,” he said. “But I want to be clear, Congress still has to act.”
Obama will host a “town hall” meeting on CNN Thursday night in an effort to keep up the push for new gun control.
“I am not on the ballot,” he said about why he is uniquely positioned to host the debate.
At the heart of Obama’s new measures, which follow up on 23 steps Obama took two years ago in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., is an effort to close what supporters of his action call the “gun show loophole,” and also what Obama’s team calls a “trust loophole.”
By forcing even the smallest firearms sellers to register as dealers, Obama hopes to keep more people barred from owning guns from purchasing them legally. Where a transaction takes place will no longer determine who must alert the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives that they are in the gun trade. And fewer exemptions under the trust and corporation loophole will be permitted, according to his actions.
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The Obama administration said there has been a dramatic rise in applications seeking to avoid background checks because the buyer went through a legal entity, up 100 percent in from 2000 to 2014.
That exemption, along with the hobbyist and collector exemption, will remain, but the ATF and FBI will scrutinize the applications more closely.
To do so, Obama has ordered the FBI to hire 230 new examiners to help man the National Instant Criminal Background Check System and wants Congress to authorize 200 new ATF agent positions in fiscal 2017. The uptick in background system examiners will bolster that workforce by 50 percent.
The system aims to identify prohibited people attempting to purchase or take position of a firearm before they actually do. The system receives 63,000 daily requests for background checks from gun dealers and sellers, according to the White House.
Obama also wants $500 million more in federal funds to treat mental illness, although those requests could be blocked by Congress through the appropriations process.
