Today in Gun Control Proposals

[Content Note: Guns.]

President Obama is reportedly tired of waiting for Congress to do something about gun violence, so he "has ordered officials to draw up an urgent new plan to strengthen background checks on gun buyers without the approval of Congress."

The president has asked his advisers to complete a proposal and submit it for his review, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said.

"The president has directed his team in short order to finalise a set of recommendations on what more the administration can do on its own to save lives from gun violence, and those recommendations will include making sure we do everything we can to keep guns out of the wrong hands, including those expanded background checks," Jarrett told a national gun violence vigil in Washington.

...On Thursday, the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said the review that Jarrett referred to had been under way for "the past couple of months" but claimed there was now increased appetite for fresh reform attempts among the US public in the recent weeks.

"These are essentially recommendations that the president has asked for from his staff based on their review of available executive authority," Earnest told reporters on Thursday.

"The working assumption of this ongoing review is that Congress hasn't acted and that's been the source of immense frustration on the part of the president," he added. "So given the congressional inaction, the question that'’s been raised is what more can the Obama administration do, and that's the substance of this review.”"

White House officials have said they are exploring closing the so-called gun show loophole that allows people to buy weapons at gun shows and online without a background check.

Fine. Sounds good. Although I'll say once again that the problem with restrictions designed to keep guns out of the "wrong" hands is that most of the people who decide to use a gun to harm someone else are, per these definitions, the "right" hands until they're not anymore.

The only meaningful thing that is going to curb gun violence is fewer guns.

Across the board. With no distinctions between the type of gun or who is supposedly using them for what. Because, as I've previously observed, the proverbial rural hunting guns commonly cited as a necessary exception to gun accessability are also used to kill and threaten, especially by domestic abusers, and the dichotomy often drawn between guns used by rural hunters and guns used by urban criminals and/or (brown) terrorists is a false (and implicitly racist) one.

In related news: "House Democrats are adding a controversial new demand to the government funding talks: ending a 19-year old ban on gun violence research by the federal government. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Thursday that Democrats will insist that the research ban be removed from law as part of the $1.1 trillion omnibus that Congress needs to pass by next week to fund the government. ...Democrats have tried unsuccessfully for nearly a decade to reverse the ban on using federal money to research gun violence."

And they will likely be unsuccessful again, because the Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NRA.