Dozens of Democratic lawmakers implored President
Obama to simply issue executive orders toughening gun curbs. They made their
impassioned plea three years before the horrific Sandy Hook Elementary School
massacre. They and others will make even more impassioned pleas to Obama to put
his executive pen to paper and enact one or more measures that put some clamps
on the types of guns that can be bought and sold and who can get them. He
almost certainly will back California Senator Diane Feinstein's bill to
reinstate the 1994 ban on assault weapons. But Feinstein won't reintroduce the
bill until sometime next year. And then the fight to get passage will be long
and drawn out.
In the meantime, Obama could heed the lawmaker's
pleas and follow the precedent of Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush and issue
executive orders o gun curbs. Bush in 1989 used the 1968 Gun Control Act to ban
the import of assault rifles.
A decade later Clinton went further and banned
firearms and ammunition from China. Bush and Clinton got around the squeal from
the gun lobby and anti-gun control
congresspersons that this was an abrogation of congressional fiat by invoking
the provision in the Gun Control Act that automatic weapons had to be "suitable
for sporting purposes" to be legally bought and sold. The stockpiles of AK-47s
and AR-15s hardly fit that description.
Obama could use the "sporting purposes" language to
allow local and federal law enforcement agencies to crack down on the proliferation
of these type weapons by mandating rigid inspections and confiscation of these weapons
at the point of import. He could expand the requirement that gun shops in Border
States and even nationally require instant reporting of anyone who purchases
two or more home grown manufactured assault weapons. He could also mandate gun
dealers to take even more stringent steps to secure firearms from theft, run
screens on their employees and end the right of gun dealers that are closing up
shop to sell off their guns absence any background checks on buyers.
These seem to be minimal steps that are well within
Obama's executive reach. But one problem is still Congress. It has absolutely
refused to even utter the words gun control for nearly a decade. Every bill
that would have imposed gun curbs has been summarily buried in a house or
senate committee. The gun lobby is a big reason for this. But the even bigger
reason is a weak public will to press legislators on gun curbs. Another problem
is the gun culture. It is deep, long standing and permissive. Millions have bought
into the line that an assault weapons ban is just a short step to banning all
guns. Yet another problem is the delusion that guns are a necessity to defend
liberties supposedly under assault from liberal Democrats and Obama. This
irrational fear has jumped gun sales in the days after Sandy Hook.
The imposition of executive orders would also make
Obama, not Congress, the face of the battle for tough gun control. The gun
control lobby would go into high gear and use every ploy to inflame, polarize,
and sow panic among millions of gun owners and anti-gun control opponents. It
would take the spotlight and the heat off congress which has faithfully pandered
to the gun lobby. But on the plus side it would force congress to seriously debate
the need for gun control legislation. That debate would force the NRA and its
congressional allies to tell why they adamantly oppose the ban of assault
weapons, tougher back ground checks, and provisions to insure that guns are
kept out of the hands of those with mental and emotional challenges. It would
force gun control opponents to tell how these protective measures infringe on
the right of law abiding citizens to own and use guns for protection and
sporting purposes. The executive orders that Obama could sign would be a good
first step toward putting White House muscle immediately behind gun control.
But executive orders only peck at the edge of getting
a handle on the gun massacre plague that confronts the nation. This can only
come from an organized and concerted movement by citizens at all levels to get
behind the efforts of groups that have repeatedly proposed common sense gun
control measures that protect the rights of Americans to legally bear arms, but
rid the streets and homes of arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. This
happened in Britain following the Dunblane, Scotland school massacre in 1996,
millions said no to guns, and got the government to eventually outlaw handgun
sales.
If Obama issues executive orders toughening gun
curbs he would and should be applauded for it. But the ball is still in
congress and the public's court to do everything possible to prevent another
Sandy Hook massacre.
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a frequent political
commentator on MSNBC and a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American
Urban Radio Network. He is the author of
How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate
editor of New America Media. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on
KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.
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Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson