"Obama Willing to Use Executive Orders on Guns" - NY Times - 19 of them in fact!

[farminator3000]

At a news conference on Monday, exactly one month after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Obama said a task force led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had “presented me now with a list of sensible, common-sense steps that can be taken to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw at Newtown doesn’t happen again. He added: “My starting point is not to worry about the politics. My starting point is to focus on what makes sense, what works.”

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Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, said Vice President Biden had informed lawmakers during a two-hour briefing on Monday that there are “19 independent steps that the president can take by executive order.” Ms. Speier said the executive action is part of the “most comprehensive gun safety effort in a generation.”

Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago and Mr. Obama’s former chief of staff, joined the debate on Monday and said that the president should “clear the table” by doing whatever he can administratively so small issues do not get in the way of the bigger legislative fights over access to guns.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/us/politics/biden-meets-with-house-democrats-on-gun-violence-proposals.html?pagewanted=1

[Bay Boy]

1. Is this a promise that I can take to the bank?

"common-sense steps that can be taken to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw at Newtown doesn’t happen again"

Seems like a silly thing to say.

[farminator3000]

2. the grammar is slightly off, i guess?

it should be 'kind of violence'.

but the idea-
“He’s putting together a pretty comprehensive list of what could be done to make a difference in this area,” said Representative Mike Thompson of California, who is heading a Democratic task force in the House. “There’s some huge, huge holes in the process that are set up to keep communities safe. We need to close those holes.”

maybe one of those 'its so crazy, it might work' things?

silly, as in totally obvious and a no-brainer, sure...

NINETEEN.

oh yeah!

[Bay Boy]

7. The grammar?

No, the promise is the problem.

[farminator3000]

3. How the Government Stifled Gun Research - Live Science

What's left is piecemeal and often small-scale research that fails to answer big questions about effective restrictions, the link between gun violence and mental health and cultural factors such as media, said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and former president of the American Psychological Association. Farley has been calling for what he dubs a "national violence project" that would approach the question of gun violence with the same gusto as the Manhattan project developing the atomic bomb, or the Apollo missions to the moon.

"I don't think we're going to get there by piecemeal efforts," Farley told LiveScience. "It's got to be big."

How we got here

In the 1980s and 1990s, research on gun violence in the United States was going strong. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) funded studies on gun violence, and research was bearing fruit, said Fred Rivara, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital. In particular, Rivara said, agency-funded research had revealed that residents of homes with guns had a higher likelihood of violent death in the home. [The History of Human Aggression]

However, once those findings came to the attention of the National Rifle Association (NRA), a political firestorm ensued. Congress members who supported the NRA first attempted to remove all funding from the NCIPC. That failed, but Congress did manage to remove $2.6 million from the CDC's overall budget, the exact amount spent on firearm injury research in the past year, Rivara wrote Dec. 21 in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

More chillingly, Congress added language to the budget appropriations bill forbidding any CDC funding that might "advocate or promote gun control."

"The net effect is that we don't have any research going on in the public health sector about ways to prevent gun violence," Rivara told LiveScience.
http://news.yahoo.com/government-stifled-gun-research-235107279.html

[Heimer]

4. What are the 19?

I dont't have the greatest understanding of what could actually be done through these 19 executive orders. From what I gather, they can really only be used to enforce current law, or shore up minor loopholes?

Can anyone shed some light?

[farminator3000]

5. later this week.. tomorrow, maybe? gotta start somewhere

“It was all focusing on enforcing existing law, administering things like improving the background database, things like that that do not involve a change in the law but enforcing and making sure that the present law is administered as well as possible,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.).

The White House declined to comment on the details of what Obama will propose.

But Biden did indicate that the remains of the Obama campaign apparatus may be activated in the effort.

“He said that this has been a real focus on the policy and that the politics of this issue, that a strategy on the politics of the issue hasn’t been undertaken yet,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) told POLITICO. “He did remind us that the campaign infrastructure is still accessible.”

Biden did not address two of the more significant issues in the gun debate: the appointment of a permanent director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the role violent images in the entertainment industry play in the nation’s gun violence.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/biden-guns-executive-actions-86187.html

[farminator3000]

6. he's sacrificing the bishop of the "AWB' to put the NRA's queen of BS in a defense position

if that makes any sense

“I think everybody acknowledges that the assault weapons ban is a challenge, but other things — like the size of the magazines, the background checks, straw purchases — are all things that have a good chance of passing,” Scott said.

Speier said she told Biden the White House should do as much as it can on its own.

“I urged him to do as much by executive order as possible,” she said. “Frankly, I don’t have a lot of confidence that this Congress is going to do anything significant.”

And Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Democrats’ Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, said the magazine ban and universal background checks would be far more effective than an assault weapons ban without the political cost.

“Probably the most recognizable thing you can say in this debate is ban assault weapons,” Thompson said. “But the other two issues” — forbidding high-capacity ammunition magazines and requiring universal background checks for gun purchases — “those two things have more impact on making our neighborhoods safe than everything else combined. Anytime you try and prohibit what kind of gun people has it generates some concern.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/biden-guns-executive-actions-86187_Page2.html