Views You Can Use: Clinton Goes After Guns

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton unveiled a plan Monday that calls for stricter gun control measures, including comprehensive background checks, repealing an immunity protection for gun manufacturers and dealers and tightening firearms sale restrictions at gun shows and on the Internet.
Clinton's comments come in the wake of a shooting Thursday at Oregon's Umpqua Community College, which left 10 people dead and nine injured. "This is not just tragic. We don't just need to pray for people," Clinton told supporters in New Hampshire. "We need to act. We need to build a movement."
Even if Clinton's proposals were implemented, writes Fox News' John R. Lott, they wouldn't have stopped the Umpqua attack last week, nor the mass public shootings throughout Obama's presidency. Lott argues that government databases used for background checks are "rife with errors" and repealing immunity for gun manufacturers would usher in unfair lawsuits that raise the price of guns "for protection." Clinton's proposals, concludes Lott, do not "address the obvious problem of gun-free zones and will ultimately make Americans less safe."

Slate's Josh Voorhees, though, commends her strategy to close the so-called gun show loophole that exempts private gun sales from background checks. According to her proposal, "Clinton would be able to use her executive authority to tweak the existing rules to reclassify anyone who sells a 'significant number of guns' as someone 'in the business of selling firearms,'" writes Voorhees. In other words, Clinton would act alone as president to subject such vendors to the same rules as "brick-and-mortar retailers." Executive action on gun control, he writes, is an "outside-the-box plan" that voters could get behind.
But just how "outside-the-box" is her plan? If Clinton could use executive authority to better regulate private gun sales, wonders The Washington Post's Greg Sargent, why couldn't President Barack Obama? Speaking with Sargent, gun policy expert Arkadi Gerney suggests he could, calling Clinton's proposal "an implicit challenge to the current administration" on gun control. "Is Obama, who has been visibly frustrated by government inaction, thinking of undertaking such an executive action?" Sargent posits. "Will Clinton's public vow to undertake such action raise the pressure on the administration to do the same?"

Clinton's gun control stance may challenge the Obama administration, but it takes aim at a more direct opponent, too, argues The Nation's Joan Walsh: Democratic 2016 hopeful Bernie Sanders. "Gun control is one issue where Clinton stands to Sanders's left," she writes. The Vermont senator, who's enjoyed a considerable rise in the polls, represents a "gun-loving state," she notes, and believes the gun control issue lies with states, not the federal government. With her proposal, Clinton is challenging Sanders quite openly, especially on gun manufacturer immunity – a law which Sanders voted for in 2005. "Sanders's insistence that 'talking to each other' is the answer ignores a troubling political reality," Walsh writes. "The vast majority of Americans, including a majority of gun owners, support a roster of sensible gun restrictions." And with Democrats "fed up" over mass shootings, Walsh writes, Clinton's direct call for gun control may have Sanders playing defense.