WH Makes Final Push to Take the Guns

Grumbling that the Obama administration has done all it can to restrict gun ownership at the federal level, Vice President Joe Biden recently urged state and local officials to pick up the task of subverting the Second Amendment.

The vice president blamed intransigence from the NRA for blocking progress on both fronts.

Biden, who convened a conference of like-minded elected officials from the states Tuesday, griped about a “dysfunctional” Congress — a Congress he said will not accept the gun control agenda pushed by the administration — and said the most meaningful debate is outside of Washington.

“We’re probably not going to get much more done in the next nine months, but this is something you just got to keep at and keep at and keep at and keep at,” he said. “It matters … Don’t quit on this.”

Biden held up Connecticut and Maryland, two states that have passed significant gun control measures in recent years, as examples.

Gun rights advocates agree that states and cities are where the most aggressive gun control efforts are taking place. Amy Hunter, a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, pointed to the mid-term elections in 2014 as proof that voters like the status quo when it comes to gun regulation.

“The majority of Americans don’t want more gun control,” she said. “They spoke at the ballot box, and [members of Congress] are heeding the will of the people.”

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Hunter said that even at the local level, gun rights advocates have been able to beat back most of the legislative proposals that would make it harder for Americans to own guns. She said advocates like billionaire Michael Bloomberg have mostly failed. “Despite spending millions of dollars in the states, he has not been able to get any of his legislation passed,” she noted.

Biden headed up a task force to review gun laws after a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and made a number of recommendations. Failing to get legislation through Congress, President Obama has taken a number of executive actions this year that fall well short of what he would like to do.

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On Tuesday, Biden cast the issue as trying to save lives, noting that as many people die in a month on some dangerous street corners in big cities as perished at the school in Connecticut.

“The bottom line here is that we know that gun violence is ravaging our communities,” he said. “Of all of civilized world, this is an exception. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Biden focused on two major policy initiatives — improving background checks and promoting technological advances in firearms. He called on states to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) by increasing the flow of information about people prohibited under law from having guns. Some states do not enter the names of all prohibited people barred because of mental illness, for instance.

Biden also pushed for “smart guns” that fire only when the owner pulls the trigger, preventing criminals or children from firing. Leading police officials across the country have derided the weapons as dangerous.

The vice president blamed intransigence from the NRA for blocking progress on both fronts. But Hunter said the NRA has no problem with with either measure. She said the group supported legislation by Sen. John Cornyn to improve the NICS.

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“We think the background check system is broken,” she said. “If you are casting a net and not getting any fish, you don’t need to cast a bigger net — you need smaller holes.”

Hunter said the NRA also has no problem with research into smart guns. “The only thing that we oppose is government mandates,” she said. “The technology isn’t even there, and already, they’re trying to pass mandates.”

John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said mandating smart guns could significantly raise the cost of gun ownership and could jeopardize the safety of gun owners. He said technology that relies on radio signals could fail if the radio wave is jammed. And while Biden compared fingerprint technology to that used by smartphones, Lott said dirt, a damp hand, or other factors can prevent it from working.

“I’m not sure that you’d want to be in a life-or-death situation where that happens,” he said.

Lott, author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” said the Obama administration’s proposal to expand background checks to the sale of guns from a private collection also presents cost concerns. Such a measure could add as much as $125 to the cost of buying a gun in high-crime cities like Washington, D.C. — which he said could be the difference between a poor person being able to afford a gun for self-defense or not.

Biden said the NICS system flags about 2.4 million purchases a year, but about 99 percent of them prove to be false positives. That should be addressed before adding more information, he said.

“If you don’t fix false positives, adding more names into it will mean more false denials,” he said.