Extract from The Guardian
President expands
background checks for online sellers and gun shows and calls on
Congress to expand funding for mental health treatment and gun
research
Wednesday 6 January 2016 05.56 AEDT
A tear-stained Barack Obama marked his final year
in office with a last-ditch call for US
gun control on Tuesday as he outlined new rules that will close
important background check loopholes but leave much of the political
heavy lifting to his successor.
In a much-anticipated speech that focused more on
what still needed to be done than the limited set of executive
actions announced in advance by the White House, the president
painted gun reform as the last great civil rights challenge of his
generation.
“In Dr King’s words, we need to feel the
fierce urgency of now, because people are dying,” a visibly
emotional Obama told an audience of mass shooting victims and
relatives in the East Room.
“Our inalienable right to life and liberty and
the pursuit of happiness, those rights were stripped from college
kids in Blacksburg and Santa Barbara and from high schoolers at
Columbine, and from first-graders in Newtown,” he added, his voice
shaking. “First-graders. And from every family who never imagined
that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a
gun.”
The president had been introduced by Mark Barden,
the father of Daniel, one of the 20 young children killed at Sandy
Hook elementary school in Newtown three years ago. As his speech rose
to its climax, with tears rolling down his cheeks, Obama said: “Every
time I think about those kids, it gets me mad and, by the way, it
happens on the streets of Chicago every day.”
In a rhetorical twist designed to undermine
arguments against reform, the president insisted his plan to force
all buyers of guns to undergo background check was not a “plot to
take your guns” but comparable to going through metal detectors to
board a plane and merely “the price of living in a civilised
society”.
“I believe in the second amendment. It’s there
written on the paper … No matter how much people try to twist my
words … I taught constitutional law. I know a little bit about
this. I get it.”
As well as expanding background checks to clarify
that online sellers and gun shows need to be licensed, Obama also
called on Congress to authorise extra spending for mental health and
enforcement agents as well as new research into technology that can
prevent unauthorised use of weapons by children and thieves.
“We need to develop new technologies that make
guns safer,” he said. “If we can develop technology that you
can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint,
why can’t we do it for guns? If a child can’t open a bottle of
Aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull the trigger on a
gun.”
Reaction has been split about the impact of
closing the existing loopholes for background checks, with the
National Rifle Association insisting it would make little difference
but gun control campaigners declaring it a landmark step in keeping
weapons out of the wrong hands.
“We’ve created a system whereby dangerous
people are allowed to play by a different set of rules … That
doesn’t make sense,” Obama said. “Everybody should have to
abide by the same rules.”
But Obama largely skipped any detailed discussion
of the measure and concentrated on a highly political effort to
persuade moderate Republicans to join his wider efforts to end
legislative deadlock.
“The gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage
right now but they cannot hold America hostage,” he said. “Congress
needs to act, but folks in this room will not rest until Congress
does … We can’t wait.”
Republican presidential candidates, who have
universally pledged to overturn Obama’s executive orders if
elected, reacted with swift outrage to the president’s
announcement.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee issued one
of the fiercest statements, saying: “In America we believe in the
constitution, not confiscations, dictatorships or Kings, and Obama’s
newest assault on the Second Amendment is a blatant, belligerent
abuse of power.” Huckabee, who is currently lagging far behind the
polls, added: “I will never bow down and surrender to Obama’s
unconstitutional, radical, anti-gun agenda.”
Earlier this week, New Jersey governor Chris
Christie called
Obama “a petulant child” for pushing gun control while former
Florida governor Jeb Bush worried that the executive action would set
a “quite dangerous” precedent.
In contrast, Democrats praised Obama’s action.
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton tweeted:
“Thank you, @POTUS, for taking a crucial step forward on gun
violence. Our next president has to build on that progress – not
rip it away.”
At the outset of his emotional speech, Obama
acknowledged the presence of Gabby Giffords, the congresswoman who
survived a gunshot wound to the head in 2011, as well as families of
gun violence victims that he enlisted directly in his call for
action.
He told Barden, the Sandy Hook father who lost his
son in December 2012: “I still remember the first time we met, the
time we spent together and the conversation we had about Daniel, and
that changed me that day, and my hope earnestly has been that it
would change the country.
“Five years ago this week a sitting member of
Congress and 18 others were shot at at a supermarket in Tuscon,
Arizona. It wasn’t the first time I’ve had to talk to the nation
in response to a mass shooting, nor would it be the last. Fort Hood.
Binghamton. Aurora. Oak Creek. Newtown. The Navy Yard. Santa Barbara.
Charleston. San Bernardino. Too many.”
Some members of the audience repeated the words:
“Too many!”
Much of the speech echoed similar heartfelt calls
by the president in the wake of each of these mass shootings, but the
White House is hoping that by staging one of its last big set-piece
events before the start of the presidential election season next
month, it can jolt the American public out of the political
stalemate.
Obama acknowledged: “It won’t happen during my
presidency. But a lot of things don’t happen overnight. A woman’s
right to vote didn’t happen overnight. The liberation of African
Americans didn’t happen overnight. LGBT rights – that was
decades’ worth of work. So just because it’s hard, that’s no
excuse not to try.”
He pleaded with advocates of gun control to be
just as determined as influential pro-gun groups. “All of us need
to demand a Congress brave enough to stand up to the gun lobby’s
lies, all of us need to stand up and protect its citizens, all of us
need to demand governors and legislators and businesses do their part
to make our communities safer. We need the wide majority of
responsible gun owners who grieve with us every time this happens and
feel like your views are not being properly represented to join with
us to demand something better.
“And we need voters who want safer gun laws and
who are disappointed in leaders who stand in their way to remember
come election time. Some of this is just simple math. Yes, the gun
lobby is loud and it is organised in defence of making it effortless
for guns to be available for anybody any time. But you know what, the
rest of us, we all have to be just as passionate, we have to be just
as organised in defence of our kids. This is not that complicated.”
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