Clinton Signals Willingness to Regulate Guns by Executive Action
She would also close the "Charleston loophole" that allows gun sales to go through if a background check is not completed within three days. It received its nickname after it allowed the mass killer behind this year's massacre in a Charleston, S.C., church to obtain his weapon.
Clinton would also try to repeal the gun industry's congressionally mandated immunity from tort law, an exquisite example of the NRA's clout. She also seeks more funding to inspect gun dealers. She wants a federal law barring domestic abusers and stalkers from firearms purchases, and she would revive the so-called "assault weapons" ban on military-style semi-automatic rifles.
Of course, critics of her proposal will argue that none of them would have stopped the young man who perpetrated the Oregon killings. Neither he nor his relatives, who authorities say purchased the killer's guns, have criminal or mental health records that would have blocked the purchases.
But as a sensible reform, background checks are the least intrusive, considering the potential benefits -- including prevention of suicides, which have outnumbered homicides by almost two-to-one among deaths by gun violence.
Still, Democrats can expect a fight, no matter what they propose. After more than a dozen mass shootings since his election, President Obama sounded both outraged and weary a day after the Oregon shootings. To those who lament how "routine" mass shootings have become, he said, "What's become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of commonsense gun legislation."
Even if he can't get legislation passed as his final months in office approach, he at least is going to talk relentlessly about the issue and push for "commonsense" laws, he said, such as expanded background checks -- which polls show are supported by most gun owners, although not by the NRA.
Executive action to work around congressional opposition is a far-from-ideal way to govern. But it unfortunately has become Washington's way of doing business as a GOP majority is willing to shut down the government to prevent a liberal president from getting his way -- or, someday, hers.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
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