Gun-free Zones: A Killer’s Dream

[lz_jwplayer video=”Tm2sf2k8″ ads=”true”]

The past two high-profile mass shootings — one at a military recruiting center in Tennessee, another at a movie theater in Louisiana — have one thing in common: Both were in gun-free zones.

But that hasn’t stopped President Obama from seeking even more restrictions on guns, and some leading lawmakers on Capitol Hill think he will soon exert his executive authority to make an end run around Congress.

Yet the very things Obama now advocates would have had no effect on the mass shootings, gun-rights advocate John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said Friday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

“The president can get rid of these gun-free zones with just a signature, an executive order,” said John Lott.

“If you look at the rules that he’s tried to put forward, none of them have had anything to do with stopping any of the mass public shootings that he has spoken about during his administration,” he said.

Lott said expanded background checks to restrict firearm access to those with mental illnesses, for example, would have been largely ineffective. And he added his voice to those who have blamed a federal policy banning guns in so-called gun-free zones, saying Obama should use his power to override that rule.

“The president can get rid of these gun-free zones with just a signature, an executive order,” Lott said.

Just hours before 59-year-old John Russel Houser shot and killed two moviegoers at a theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, Obama gave an interview to the British Broadcasting Corp. on Thursday in which he called gun control “the one area where I feel that I’ve been most frustrated and most stymied.”

“The United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws — even in the face of repeated mass killings,” Obama said. “If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands. And for us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing.”

Obama could use executive orders to limit access to firearms.

Obama added that he intended to “keep working” on the issue, but with both houses of Congress in Republican hands, there is little chance of restricting the Second Amendment. Obama could, however, use executive orders to limit access to firearms.

Asked on Friday to rate on a scale of 1-to-10 the likelihood of Obama asserting such executive authority, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said: “10.”

“What he can get done, I don’t know but first of all, there won’t be legislation that compromises the Second Amendment as far as I’m concerned,” the Iowa Republican said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

“If he does something by executive action, it is going to bring about an appropriation bill saying that none of the money can be used to carry out executive orders that is compromising the Second Amendment,” Grassley said.

[lz_virool paragraph=”6″]