Discussion: Obama: I've Been 'Most Stymied' On Gun Control Issues While In Office

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Discussion for article #238718

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God bless this man.

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I don’t actually remember him mentioning this issue at all until the Newton shootings. Before that, the only gun-related bill he saw was one to allow guns to be carried in to national parks (which he signed).

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Overall I admire the president. But I do not recall any push for gun safety or regulation from him at ALL.

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And think about it, he goes to these summits and hangs out with the leaders of the other advanced nations, and they’re his peers, OK? And he has to think about this disgusting blot on our national character. I think in that way a President is uniquely placed to feel troubled and ashamed about the situation.

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I certainly remember his talking about it after Newtown. But he’s been generally reluctant to expend political capital where it won’t do any good, and in this case his involvement could even be counterproductive. My intuition is that this situation has to change from the bottom up. Moms and dads have to come into local council meetings and demand greater safety in their communities, and the local officials on up to the national level have to see the jig’s up, they can’t take NRA money any more, they can’t coddle the gun nuts, the voters are saying we want this and that or you’re gone. That’s when it’ll change IMHO.

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I don’t imagine George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan felt likewise. Their attitude was “We’re the biggest, baddest and most powerful country in the world and we don’t give a **** what you think of us.”

Quite frankly, our President - regardless of party - should not be that concerned with what people outside the U.S. think of them and America. They have to do what best serves America’s own interests.

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I’m not sure America’s interests are served by ignoring what the rest of the world thinks generally. And when we have stratospheric rates of gun violence in a world where the other advanced countries basically have almost none, maybe we should ask ourselves why that is and if it has to be that way. It’s not a question of what they think.

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On national TV, he specifically tasked Biden to work on gun control after the CT shootings.

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The one thing I wish he would say loudly and clearly on national TV is that the Constitution specifically states “well-regulated militia”.

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In January 2013, the President took 23 executive actions and proposed (mainly, again) a variety of gun safety legislation. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/wh_now_is_the_time_full.pdf He’s also taken to the bully pulpit on this issue more eloquently and with more passion than any president has ever — particularly after Sandy Hook and Charleston. Perhaps, you weren’t paying attention, @krusher, but it did happen.

It is true that he didn’t expend the kind of political capital on gun violence that he did on healthcare or now on Iran’s nuclear program. And, predictably, Congress failed to act. As @MattinPA hinted, he’s savvy enough to understand that the corrupting influence of the gun lobby has to be counterbalanced by an organized groundswell for sanity.

Obama’s chief fault as president, IMO, has been a deficit in the political skill necessary to keep Democratic majorities in tact during non-presidential elections. That certainly has contributed to Congress’ near-criminal disregard for the good of the country. Still, one’s finger would need to point in a pretty roundabout way to blame him for Congress inaction on gun safety.

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Quite frankly, our President - regardless of party - should not be that concerned with what people outside the U.S. think of them and America. They have to do what best serves America’s own interests.

I completely disagree. That is why Bush and Cheney were such a massive failure. We HAVE to be concerned with what people outside of the US think of us. If we want to be part of a world community and not end up like North Korea, it is important to ensure that we are not so self-absorbed and short sighted as to think that the opinion of the world does not matter.

Should we ONLY base our decisions off of that? Absolutely not. But we should listen and weigh how our actions resonate through the world community. And certainly our inability to keep thousands of dying, not from war or terrorism, but from our sick gun culture is embarrassing and sad.

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And just what would those interests be? Would Global Climate Change, Nuclear Proliferation, Emergent Diseases, rapid depletion of critical resources, global-scale pollution be among them? Solving and mitigating these threats to security require international cooperation so we better be concerned with what the world thinks of us. That’s part of being “influential”

P.S. As a Canadian observer once said: Americans don’t live in the world; they only live in America.

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“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,”

The NRA must be proud.

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I think he is thisclose to referring to mass shootings as domestic terrorism, which he should.

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“Quite frankly, our President - regardless of party - should not be that concerned with what people outside the U.S. think of them and America. They have to do what best serves America’s own interests.”

You couldn’t be more wrong. Much of what best serves America’s interests is dependent on other nations in the world. We live in an interdependent world and the days of the U.S. going it alone are long past. We need to learn to live with the rest of the world and give up our cowboy, go it alone, myth which is little more than a recipe for disaster.

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I was quoting someone else there—you and I agree.

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I had just copied that sentence from the story and was going to paste it and make almost the same comment but you beat me to it,

Those statistics are insane and it is pathetic that they are not enough to make the congress critters do something about it. This doesn’t happen in any other civilized country.

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This is not the President’s fault. He has talked about it over the years and got serious after Newton. The fault lies in our congress people who are owned lock, stock and barrel by the NRA and those who are too chicken to stand up and be counted.

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‘Most Stymied’ ?

The man is a fucking coward. He doesn’t have the guts to take on the gun manufacturers. That’s the battle he will not fight. The NRA is nothing more than a bunch of salesmen pitching products for the manufacturers.

And until we stop terrorizing the rest of the world the violence here at home will continue unabated. Enjoy the movie.