Obama calls for agreement on gun reforms

[steve2470]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42063945/ns/politics/

By Jeff Mason
updated 3/13/2011 8:39:38 PM ET

President Barack Obama waded into the politically treacherous gun control debate on Sunday, calling for reform of rules to prevent attacks like the one that wounded an Arizona congresswoman two months ago.

Obama, in an opinion piece published in the Arizona Daily Star, said some 2,000 people had perished from gun violence in the short time since a gunman in Tucson killed six people and shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head.

"Every single day, America is robbed of more futures. It has awful consequences for our society. And as a society, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to put a stop to it," he wrote.

Obama said he believed the U.S. Constitution's second amendment guaranteed a citizen's right to bear arms.

[Cid_B]

1. He'll regret it.....

A sure loser of an issue....

[steve2470]

2. +1 nt

[sharesunited]

6. So was racial equality. But justice required it.

[malaise]

8. He is 100% correct n/t

[jtuck004]

3. 27 million people underemployed. Higher priority. n/t

[Doug.Goodall]

4. Our President does not have the courage to address the issue of gun violence in this country

Former President Bill Clinton had that courage, and put his money were his mouth was by enacting legislation to limit the easy availability of destructive guns whose only purpose is to kill human beings.

I hate to say it, but President Obama is just paying lip service to those of us that want strict gun control. Making statements that are crafted to appease without actually taking any concrete actions are less than useless. His only proposal is to tinker with existing laws and step up enforcement of laws on the books. In other words he makes a big show about maintaining the status quo.

Rather than use the tragic shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, which has focused national attention on the misuse of guns in the United States, President Obama flounders around in the middle making no definitive statement one way or the other. Gun control is not a centrist issue, and taking a centrist position makes the President look weak.

What we need is both enforcement of gun laws and additional gun laws at the National level that takes these powerful weapons out of people's hands.

[ssgharig]

7. Gun Control is just Control

We need stiff penalties, not more laws. There are enough laws, just too many liberal judges that wont impose the full force of the Criminal Justice system. We have far too many bleeding hearts liberals that want to give criminals a second chance. Screw that! If convicted, you should serve the entire sentence, no parole, no early release. That will be the fix. The other point is there are too many whining touchy feely pacifists that dont want to intrude on someones civil rights, and that prevents law enforcement from going after people like the shooter in AZ and at Virgina Tech. Both of the assholes were on the police radar, but there a too many roadblocks to arrest them. Neither one would have been able to purchase a gun if the police and mental health professionals were permitted to communicate. You liberal shitbags are responsible for those shootings!!

[Fumesucker]

10. Funny, we have the most punitive society in the industrialized world..

By a substantial margin. Indeed, by some measures the USA is the most punitive society on the planet, fully 25% of the prisoners in the world are incarcerated in the land of the free.

And yet we can still find plenty of Americans who think we aren't punitive enough and if we would just punish more people more harshly then we could solve all our problems.

[pipoman]

9. What additional gun laws do you suggest?

The real problem is, in fact, failure to enforce and underfunding of enforcement:

The ATF Does Not Always Make Timely Firearms Retrievals

We identified delays in retrieving firearms in 65 of the 188 cases (35 percent) we reviewed for which investigations were completed. In 28 of these 65 cases (43 percent), it took from four months to over a year to retrieve the firearm. We identified a number of reasons for these delays:

* The Brady Operations Branch did not have the technological capability to transfer the delayed denials directly to the field and satellite offices, and instead routed the denials through the division NICS coordinators. Not all NICS coordinators were timely in forwarding these denials to the field offices.

* Insufficient staffing at some ATF field and satellite offices made it difficult for special agents to investigate the large volume of labor-intensive NICS cases in addition to conducting other high-priority investigations, such as those involving firearms trafficking, explosives, and arsons. In addition, the large geographic territories some of the field offices cover make retrieving a firearm a time-consuming process.

* ATF special agents did not consider most of the prohibited persons who had obtained guns to be dangerous and therefore did not consider it a priority to retrieve the firearm promptly.

* The ATF had not established timeliness standards for retrieving firearms and did not track the retrieval process.

These delays increase the risk that prohibited persons may use the illegally obtained firearm to harm others or to otherwise commit a crime. In one of our sampled cases, for instance, the prohibited person fired the weapon at another person's car and was subsequently charged by local law enforcement with aggravated assault.

-snip-

In addition, of the 59 sampled cases involving third party transfers, only 24 cases (41 percent) contained evidence that the special agent had conducted a background check to verify that the third party was not prohibited. Failure to verify the prohibited status of the third party can result in the firearm being transferred from one prohibited person to another.

-snip-

A June 28, 2001, memorandum from the Attorney General directed the U.S. Attorneys to "make it a priority to enforce the law against those persons who attempt to subvert the legitimate crime prevention objectives of the Brady Act and to incorporate this new focus into comprehensive prosecutive efforts." During CYs 2002 and 2003, approximately 120,000 cases were referred by the FBI to the Brady Operations Branch. Of these cases, the ATF formally referred only 230 to the USAOs, and the USAOs accepted 185, or 80 percent for prosecution.3 Of these cases, 154 were prosecuted.

http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/ATF/e0406/exec.htm

There are 10's of thousands of firearms regulations on the books. There are very, very few ideas left which aren't simply redundant.

[DrDan]

5. finally . . . . now for some details and some action

[pipoman]

11. Couldn't the same be said of

ATVs, swimming pools, organized sports, autos, alcohol, money, skiing, free speech, religion, etc.?

"Every single day, America is robbed of more futures. It has awful consequences for our society. And as a society, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to put a stop to it,"