“From day one, the president has never respected the right to safe and legal gun ownership that our nation has valued since its founding,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said in a statement released before Obama finished speaking at the White House on Tuesday. “Rather than focus on criminals and terrorists, he goes after the most law-abiding of citizens. His words and actions amount to a form of intimidation that undermines liberty.”
GOP presidential candidates also slammed the announced actions, even ahead of their official rollout. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said Obama was “obsessed with undermining the Second Amendment” and “the Constitution in general,” while front-runners Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz both explicitly promised to undo the actions upon taking office.
“He’s going to sign another executive order having to do with the Second Amendment, having to do with guns,” Trump said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “I will veto. I will unsign that so fast.”
“Let me tell you what I intend to do on the first day in office,” Cruz said at a campaign stop in Iowa Monday. “The first thing I intend to do is rescind every single illegal and unconstitutional executive action.”
Obama’s new actions take relatively narrow steps to tighten existing laws. Far from imposing universal background checks – an effort that failed in the Senate as recently as December – his new rules won’t even entirely close the so-called gun show loophole, which allows the sale of firearms by unlicensed dealers at gun shows to occur without a background check on the buyer.
The new actions aim to clarify and narrow who can sell guns without a license, based on considerations like how many guns a person sells and how often, while still exempting people who sell a gun from their private collection or transfer a weapon to family or friends. The goal would be to require those who currently sell hundreds or thousands of guns each year, often online, to conduct background checks.
Among other things, the actions also call for the FBI to hire 230 more staffers to better handle the workload of conducting background checks, a tighter reporting requirement for manufacturers or retailers when a gun is lost or stolen in transit, and the removal of barriers preventing states from reporting information about those prohibited from possessing a gun for mental health reasons.
While Republican lawmakers are nearly unanimous in their opposition to any expansion of gun control laws, the public – including gun owners – broadly supports requiring background checks for gun sales, including those at shows and from private collections.
In July, a Pew Research Center survey found 85 percent of Americans, including 79 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats, favored expanded background checks.