Obama Puts Politics ahead of People on Guns

On guns, President Obama is either willfully ignorant or just doesn’t get it.  According to a report commissioned by his own CDC,

• ·         Most indices of crime and gun violence are getting better, not worse.
• ·         Handguns, not so called assault weapons, are the tools of criminals. 
• ·         Mass shootings aren’t a problem. 
• ·         Gun suicide is a bigger killer than gun homicide. 
• ·         Guns are used for self-defense often and effectively. 
• ·         It isn’t true that most gun acquisitions by criminals can be blamed on a few bad dealers.

More recently, a study in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy makes the compelling case that neither banning nor reducing the number of firearms would reduce the number of murders or suicides.  This study examined both domestic and international data and found no link between violence and firearms ownership.

So Harvard and the Administration’s agency have come out against the myth that guns cause crime yet that Administration persists in pushing ineffective gun control policies as a salve to the grief of the public affected by violence committed by evil people with firearms.

Why ineffective?  Because the two new executive orders would do nothing to prevent criminals from using firearms.  One order would end the import of military surplus weapons – not machine guns, mind you, but military looking semi-automatic rifles.  More than 250,000 of these weapons have been imported and sold since 2005 and not a single one has been linked to a crime.

Second, Obama would force corporate board members and officers to undergo background checks if a gun was to be registered to the corporation, foundation or trust.  Once again, when is the last time anyone has heard of a foundation trustee or CFO use a gun registered to a corporation in the commission of a crime.  The answer – never.  Certainly, not in any of the mass shootings that have prompted the current flurry attempted gun control measures.

Once again President Obama seems intent on trumping fundamental rights based on political calculations concerning the public’s emotional reaction, not a reasoned assessment of the facts.

One shouldn’t be surprised since the President’s administration long ago broke Obama’s promise to be the most transparent and open administration in history and to follow science, not politics, in matters where science can comment.

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