President Obama has issued 10 executive orders changing the way gun sales are monitored and carried out, redefining a gun “dealer” to include almost any private citizens who sell even a single gun annually.
Under the Obama edict, many person-to-person sales of firearms would now be scooped up by the federal government’s gun database.
“The goal is keeping bad actors away from firearms,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters.
Second Amendment advocates who spoke Monday with WND said they believe the new rules are about more than safety, since not a single mass shooting in recent years would have been stopped by the rules. They said the goal is to create a national gun registry that tracks the movement of nearly every gun in America.
Federal law currently does not require anyone who sells an occasional gun – such as a hobbyist or collector – to get a federal license. But hundreds of new federal agents will be hired to conduct checks and put sellers on “notice” that whether they are engaged in an actual business or not depends on several factors, according to an NBC report.
Among those factors are how quickly they sell the guns they acquire, whether they sell guns for more than they paid for them, and how often and in what quantity they sell firearms. But even something as simple as accepting a credit card would require a gun seller to get a federal license, even if the seller were a hobbyist or collector who sold or traded a couple of guns per year. Manning a counter at a gun show would also require the seller to obtain a federal firearms license and conduct background checks.
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“These rules will provide clear notice to those individuals who try to hide behind the hobby exception when they are selling for a profit or for a business,” Lynch said.
In 2015, roughly 22.2 million background checks were conducted. That will be greatly expanded and require a legion of new federal agents.
The White House will seek funding from Congress to allow the FBI to hire 230 more investigators who will conduct federal background checks on gun buyers.
The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms will also notify firearms dealers that they must file a report when guns from their inventory are lost or stolen, including those in transit.
The mental health community will also be required to report many more patients to the FBI for addition to a database of people forbidden from purchasing a firearm, Politico reported.
There is already an exemption in the federal medical privacy laws, also called HIPPA, for law enforcement. And since the mass shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the number of patients reported to the FBI has tripled, to 3 million, and 6,000 gun sales have been prevented due to these reports by doctors. Expanding this further will present privacy issues that will no doubt be the subject of debate.
Another provision of the executive orders requires gun manufacturers to explore new ways to use technology that would prevent the accidental discharge of weapons.
None of the new provisions would have stopped Adam Lanza from stealing his mother’s guns and going on the killing spree at Sandy Hook.
Obama acknowledged that the new rules won’t stop “every mass shooting,” but there’s a question as to whether they would have stopped any of the recent mass shootings.
In San Bernardino, California, Syed Farook and his jihadist wife, Tashfeen Malik, used guns purchased by a friend, Enrique Marquez, who would not have been stopped by any of the new Obama rules.
But to Obama, the rules are all about “common sense gun safety,” as the administration has adopted the narrative of anti-gun activist Michael Bloomberg and his organization, Everytown for Gun Safety. Bloomberg has also funded the anti-gun groups Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
Obama met with Bloomberg recently to discuss what action to take to curb “gun violence” in America. Then he met with Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and a top ATF official.
The new rules “will potentially save lives in this country and spare families the pain and extraordinary loss they’ve suffered as result of guns being in the hands of the wrong people,” Obama told reporters.
“The good news is that these are not only recommendations that are well within my legal authority and the executive branch, but they’re also ones that the overwhelming majority of the American people, including gun owners, support and believe in,” Obama said.
This, as Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano pointed out Monday night, despite the fact that the people’s own representatives in Congress have specifically rejected many of the provisions on expanded background checks.
Obama also said he had the “legal authority” to issue the executive orders and that they would be “consistent with the Second Amendment and people’s lawful right to bear arms.”
It’s also something legal scholars have disagreed on. Napolitano, among others, says the orders are “clearly unconstitutional” because the president does not have the authority to make laws under the U.S. Constitution.
Several gun groups, including the Second Amendment Foundation, have already said they will challenge the executive orders in court.
Napolitano said he believed they would be overturned by the courts.
The other big issue is whether Congress, under Republican control, will fund the orders.
While the number of mass shootings has been on the rise over the past decade or so, the remainder of the fatal shootings has been consistently in decline, the Washington Post reported.
After the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last summer, WND compiled a list of two dozen killers who since 1980 have carried out mass shootings while under the influence of psychotropic, mind-altering drugs prescribed by doctors for mental illness. Many of the drugs carry warnings about violent side effects.
It is a well-documented fact that, since the early 1980s, a shift occurred in the direction of treating the mentally ill. Rather than institutionalize them, the preferred method was to “mainstream” them, encouraging them to function in society while being treated with a mind-numbing array of new antidepressants being developed by the pharmaceutical industry. This time frame loosely follows the rise of the commercial pharmaceutical industry.
The report would indicate that there is more to making a community safe than merely regulating gun purchases. Other issues some would like to see added to the debate is whether more people with serious mental illness are being treated and released into communities where they are prescribed dangerous drugs that increase their likelihood of committing violent acts.
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Related commentary:
Obama’s gun-hating political theater, by Thomas Sowell