On January 5, 2016, President Barack Obama, whilst shedding tears at the innocent lives cut down by firearms, introduced a set of executive actions to curb gun violence in the United States. Specifically, Obama aims to make background checks for handgun purchases more thorough, comprehensive and efficient, provide more resources for law enforcement and federal agencies to enforce existing gun safety laws, increase the treatment of mental health problems and reporting thereof to the background check system, encouraging federal agencies to prioritize gun safety technology and conduct and sponsor research thusly. With the latter idea in mind, Obama asked:
“If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?”
Though Speaker of the House Paul Ryan claims, “From day one, the president has never respected the right to safe and legal gun ownership that our nation has valued since its founding” and that Obama's executive orders “amount to a form of intimidation that undermines liberty,” Obama's proposed measures are as reasonable as they are necessary.
Between President Ronald Reagan's scaling back of gun safety measures during the 1980s, particularly a 1968 law nixing the sale of firearms via mail order passed in response to the 1963 assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the deranged, sociopathic, trigger-happy hick fascism passed off as rugged individualism that has tainted the National Rifle Association since right-wing fanatic and convicted murderer Harlon Carter became its leader in 1977, it has come to the point where on average, over 100,000 people are shot in the United States, and nearly a third of that number get dead for it. Even more disturbing, about nine percent of the aforementioned fatalities are children and teenagers.
It's no surprise that President Obama would be fed up with these grim developments. Less than one week into 2016, 150 people have been reported to have been killed by guns, making for an average of 25 per day from January 1 to January 6, with the most recent being a shooting in Lakeland, Florida that killed three and injured a fourth.
Featured image credit: Barack Obama (BBC News).
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