Obama’s Not Taking Your Guns: That’s the Problem

Guns are the talk of the nation right now. All across America, conservatives, NRA members, hunters, and law enforcement officials are crying, “Don’t take our guns!” James Yeager, CEO of a weapons skills and training company called Tactical Response, told America that he would start killing people (with his guns, of course) if Obama’s proposed laws infringed on his gun ownership. Others, most notably a faction of sheriffs, have declared that they will refuse to follow or enforce laws that will take guns away from citizens. They are neglecting the fact that this is not the Wild West and they are not independent vigilantes, but they are also neglecting an even more important fact: no one, including President Obama, is proposing to take away their guns.

In the debate about gun control, the facts are being largely ignored. Obama has proposed some very reasonable measures, such as making information on lost and stolen guns more available to law enforcement, and running background checks before returning a seized gun to an individual. Obama’s executive orders are, in fact, so tame as to likely have only a fraction of the desired effect. Yet it’s nearly impossible to get a moment of quiet to read them in the first place, because there are so many noisy temper tantrums being thrown by outspoken and uninformed gun advocates. The discussion about guns isn’t centering on the actual measures being taken to prevent gun violence, because there is so much distracting hyperbole surrounding the issue.

However, if you do take a moment to look at the new laws, you’ll find that they are mostly common sense things that should have been in place already. This is a problem—they are good measures, but they don’t go far enough. Obama’s first term was marred by what can best be called a lack of ballsiness: he didn’t take a strong enough stance on many issues to get things done. This instance looks like a repeat performance of that first term. Since he’s getting such an absurdly vile reaction to the very limited measures he’s taking anyway, it seems like he should just go all the way and make some serious gun bans, as they’ve done successfully in other countries such as Britain and Australia.

At the same time, however, I can’t fault the President entirely for the lack of intensity in his gun control measures, in fact, I’m not sure I can really fault him at all. Obama is not the only person in the government, and his power is limited even further by the Republican-run House of Representatives. Though he’ll never run for office again, he can’t afford to entirely alienate Republican Americans, and he certainly doesn’t want to be labeled undemocratic in the annals of history. So it’s hard to say what Obama could realistically get done beyond what he’s already trying.

Listening to conservatives kicking and screaming about perfectly sensible new laws, it becomes easy to be pessimistic. However, Americans don’t tend towards pessimism, and I would be doing readers a disservice if I dropped the conversation without any encouraging words. Instead, let’s look at the best-case scenario, and the measures we all can take to achieve it.

If Obama’s gun laws succeed—that is, if they are enforced, and remain in effect long enough to see any changes they might make—they might pave the way for stricter measures in the future. If we see a drop in gun violence and it can be attributed to Obama’s measures, the logical response would be pass further, more forceful, laws to garner even greater effects. In Britain, it seems that gun control went into effect virtually overnight after a 1996 school massacre brought attention to the country’s gun violence problem. In America, we are not quite so efficient: our polarized political system makes it difficult to get anything done quickly and decisively. Yet nothing will ever change if we don’t start somewhere, so Obama’s laws, timid though they are, are something to support wholeheartedly.

As citizens who want to see an end to gun violence, our job is to not lose hope in the fight for gun control. Be supportive of these new measures, even if their effects aren’t drastic. Maybe it will take some time, but if we can gradually make the changes that ought to be made instantly, at least future generations won’t endure a country as riddled with violence as the one we have now. Americans are idealistic by nature. Be realistic about the effects that the current gun control reforms are likely to have, but be idealistic about what they could lead to in the future.