On December 14–the 3rd anniversary of the heinous attack on Sandy Hook Elementary–President Obama used a Facebook post to try to shame Congress into passing gun controls that would not have prevented the Sandy Hook attack from happening.
Moreover, the chief gun control component pushed by Obama–expanded background checks–is already in place in California and Colorado, where it has failed miserably against determined high profile shooters.
Writing on Facebook, Obama said:
Soon after the [Sandy Hook] shootings, I took a series of executive actions within my power to reduce gun violence and keep more of our kids safe. Their governor in Connecticut, Dan Malloy, worked with his legislature to pass some commonsense gun safety reforms – reforms that didn’t infringe upon anyone’s right to bear arms, but actually might have prevented another massacre in the meantime. And two United States senators – a Democrat from West Virginia and a Republican from Pennsylvania, both gun owners, both strong defenders of our Second Amendment rights, both with “A grades” from the NRA – worked together to write a commonsense compromise bill that would have required virtually everyone who buys a gun to get a background check. That’s it. Dangerous people would no longer get to play by a different set of rules than responsible gun owners who bought their guns the right way. Pretty commonsense stuff.
But the gun lobby and its allies mobilized to paint that compromise reform as an assault on our freedom. And even though background checks were supported by some 90% of the American people and a majority of NRA households, the Senate surrendered, voting to block those background checks – even with the families of Newtown in attendance.
There are a lot of things missing from the picture Obama paints for readers. One of the missing points is the fact that Senator Manchin (D-WV)–the architect of the post-Sandy Hook gun control legislation–admitted that the legislation would not have prevented the Sandy Hook attack from happening. On a broader note, no amount of gun control would have prevented the attack from happening because Adam Lanza did not buy his guns. Rather, he stole them.
Obama also leaves out the fact that “dangerous people” who carry out mass shootings more often than not go through background checks to acquire the guns they use. In fact, it’s harder to name a high profile shooter from the last 10 years who skirted background checks for his or her guns than it is to name one who did not.
Breitbart News previously reported that the list attackers and alleged attackers who passed background checks for their firearms include Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik (San Bernardino handguns), Chris Harper Mercer (Umpqua Community College), Vester Lee Flangan (Virgina), John Russell Houser (Lafayette), Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez (Chattanooga), Dylann Roof (Charleston), Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi (Garland), Jared and Amanda Miller (Las Vegas), Elliot Rodger (Santa Barabara), Ivan Lopez (Fort Hood 2014), Darion Marcus Aguilar (Maryland mall), Karl Halverson Pierson (Arapahoe High School), Paul Ciancia (LAX), Andrew John Engeldinger (Minneapolis), Aaron Alexis (DC Navy Yard), Tennis Melvin Maynard (West Virginia), Wade Michael Page (Sikh Temple), James Holmes (Aurora theater), Jared Loughner (Tucson), Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood 2009), Jiverly Wong (Binghamton), Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Naveed Haq (Seattle), and Mark Barton (Atlanta).
In his Facebook post, Obama admitted that gun control cannot prevent every shooting. Yet he suggested doing something is better than doing nothing, saying, “But what if we tried to stop even one? What if Congress did something – anything – to save one American, or a classroom of Americans, or a stadium’s worth of Americans from losing their lives to gun violence in the years to come?”
If Obama is really ready to do “something”–even “anything”–then let’s act to remove the one common factor in the overwhelming majority of mass public attacks. That commonality is not the type of gun used or the color of the gunman’s skin. Rather, it is the gun free zone policy that so many mass attackers seek out in order to execute their evil with minimal resistance. These zone are what Congress should be addressing because such zones create entire rooms and buildings full of sitting ducks barred from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.