By AWR Hawkins
Washington DC – -(Ammoland.com)- On Monday, 24 2015 Senate Democrats urged President Obama to circumvent Congress by using executive action to expand background checks to cover private gun sales.
The effort is being pushed by Sens. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), but was also championed by Senator Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) days after the on-air August 26 attack of a reporter and cameraman near Roanoke, VA.
The gunman in that attack–Vester Flanagan–passed a background check for his handgun, so Kaine’s push would have done nothing to prevent the attack from happening.
According to WMDT, the latest two Senators to join the effort to get Obama to go around Congress are Sens. Chris Coon (D-DE) and Tom Carper (D-DE). The Senators want Obama to use executive action to expand background checks to include private gun owners who sell a certain number of guns each year.
Breitbart News previously reported that Obama began talking about this expansion after the October 1 2015 Umpqua Community College attack. NBC News reported that the threshold being weighed for triggering background checks on private gun owners was “50 or 100 guns a year” being sold.
But Michael Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety is pressing Obama to require a background check for any gun sold if that gun was owned less than a year before being sold–even if one gun is all that is sold in a calendar year.
This is an insidious way to secure all the new regulations on gun shows that Democrats have pursued, but failed to secure, for nearly two decades. It is also a devious way to take another step toward a national gun registry, which would have to exist for all new gun purchases in order to know whether a private gun owner keeps a firearm for longer than a year before selling it.
It is interesting to note that background checks were passed for all the guns used in the Umpqua Community College attack. So the executive action being demanded by 24 Senate Democrats would not have prevented that heinous attack from happening.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins.