By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Heading into his final year in office, anti-gun President Barack Obama recently said in an interview with GQ that he hopes gun control remains “the dominant issue” of the next 12 months.
Even the Washington Times picked up on this, publishing comments from the interview. The president told GQ that he “will do everything I can to make sure that there’s a sustained attention paid to this thing.”
Acknowledging that he might take executive action, Obama said, “We want to make any executive action we take as defensible as possible legally.”
He then said something else that raised eyebrows.
“The main thing that I’ve been trying to communicate,” he said, regarding mass shooting incidents, “is that, contrary to popular belief, Americans are not more violent than people in other developed countries. But they have more deadly weapons to act out their rage, and that’s the only main variable that you see between the U.S. and these other countries.”
The president seemed to lament the fact that he has not been successful with Congress in passing gun control legislation, even after Sandy Hook. He did not, however, even mention the fact that measures he and others proposed in response to the December 2012 tragedy would not have prevented it even if they had been law.
He also overlooked the fact that Connecticut at the time had some of the strictest gun control laws of any state in the nation. Yet killer Adam Lanza bypassed all of them simply because he murdered his mother and took her guns, which had been legally purchased, to the elementary school in Newtown.
What the president and other anti-gunners continually refer to as “common sense gun-safety rules” are actually restrictive gun control measures. Background checks, waiting periods, licensing, registration; all of these measures only inconvenience and penalize honest citizens. Criminals and mayhem-bent crazy people ignore such laws, and historically, mass shooters do not have criminal records that would disqualify them from legally purchasing firearms and passing background checks, which they have.
Gun control does appear to be a hot subject among Democrats so far this year, and recently, Hillary Rodham Clinton was called to task by the Associated Press Fact Checker about claims she made during a presidential debate in early November. According to the AP story, her claim about gun-related homicides “appears to be unsupported on all counts.”
Clinton, as quoted by the AP and confirmed by the Daily Mail, claimed during her response to a question about gun control that since an earlier Democratic debate, “nearly 3,000 people have been killed by guns. Two hundred children have been killed.” She also asserted that during the same period there had been “21 mass shootings.” But according to the news agency, that doesn’t square with the facts.
Citing figures from the Gun Violence Archive, the AP said there had been 11,485 gun-related deaths in the U.S. so far during the year at the time of the debate, “an average of just under 1,000 per month, making Clinton’s figure appear to be highly exaggerated.” The story also said the data indicated that for children and teenagers, “70 from those age groups (have been) killed (with) firearms,” while Clinton claimed 200 had died.
The discrepancy was not lost on Second Amendment activists who have complained about media bias when it comes to some of the assertions made by Clinton, not just during the campaign but dating back to her time as Secretary of State.
