Obama’s Gun Agenda Targets You, Not Criminals

President Obama is running out of novel ways to call for new gun control laws and has indicated he intends to act alone.

But if he is truly so interested in limiting gun violence, maybe he should focus on those who possess guns illegally and are often out to commit crimes, instead of curtailing the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners.

Federal crime statistics show that gun prosecutions have declined markedly during Obama’s presidency. This begs the question of whether Obama is trying to pursue some ideological mission or really wants to reduce violence.

The numbers from three different sources vary, because they count different offenses and use different time frames, but the trend is the same:

• According to the United States Attorneys’ annual report, federal prosecutors filed gun charges in 8,078 cases in fiscal year 2014. That is down 13.3 percent from fiscal year 2009 and 27 percent since fiscal year 2004, which saw a 15-year high of 11,067.
• According to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, 7,537 defendants faced federal firearms charges from June 2013 to June 2014. That was down 13.8 percent from the 12 months ended June 2008.
• According to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which uses Freedom of Information Act requests to track prosecutions, prosecutors obtained 6,002 convictions on weapons violations in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. That is down 5.8 percent from the previous year and 34.8 percent from fiscal year 2005.

Those statistics lead gun control critics to argue that Obama should focus on the enforcement powers he has, which they say more properly target criminals.

“We always call for first enforcing what’s on the books,” said Amy Hunter, a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action.

Presidents do not exert day-to-day control over which criminals to indict, but each of the 94 U.S. attorneys is an Obama appointee, and the administration can set prosecutorial priorities. Former Attorney General Eric Holder did this, for instance, when he announced the Justice Department would not enforce federal marijuana laws in states where it is legal.

Obama said in January 2013 that federal prosecutors would prioritize firearms violations after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut the previous month.

And yet, prosecutions continue to fall. It’s not clear he did much of anything to push for his supposedly priority.

The most common type of gun prosecution, accounting for more than 80 percent of firearms convictions in FY 2015, were for possession of a gun by convicted felons, drug abusers, illegal immigrants and other people barred from having firearms.

The next most common prosecution involves the use of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime, like bank robbery or drug trafficking, and it often triggers mandatory-minimum prison sentences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BekZCpzkSfA

Robert J. Cottrol, author of “Gun Control and the Constitution: The Courts, Congress, and the Second Amendment,” said focusing on “micro-cultures of extreme violence” is a better use of law-enforcement resources than regulations that target all gun owners.

The recent trend among federal officials has been away from harsh punishment for law breakers. In October, for instance, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to reduce mandatory-minimum penalties for certain gun offenses.

Between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2, 6,000 federal inmates left prison early as a result of new sentencing rules that make lighter penalties for drug offenses retroactive. The U.S. Sentencing Commission estimates that an additional 8,550 inmates would be eligible for release by Nov. 1, 2016.

The Sentencing Commission decided to let judges decide whether early release would apply to people with lengthy criminal records or convictions involving weapons. The Associated Press determined that almost 100 of the first batch of released inmates had carried semi-automatic weapons or had significant criminal histories.

“Our attention is drawn to the mass shootings because they’re horrifying and the number of victims is high,” Cottrol said, adding that regulations in response to them “would have no impact because the number of people is minuscule.”