Accuracy in Media

President Obama called for more “common sense gun regulations,” but did not call it “gun control” and did not outline what those regulations would mean. Here is what Obama said regarding the renewal of gun control efforts in his speech last night (via Oregon Live):

It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun.

And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common sense gun legislation.

Right now, I can imagine the press release is being cranked out. “We need more guns,” they’ll argue. “Fewer gun safety laws.”

Does anybody really believe that? There are scores of responsible gun owners in this country, they know that’s not true.

We know because of the polling that says the majority of Americans understand we should be changing these laws, including the majority of responsible, law abiding gun owners.

There is a gun for roughly every man woman and child in America. So how can you with a straight face make the argument that more guns will make us safer?

We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths.

So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns, is not borne out by the evidence.

We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours. Great Britain. Australia. Countries like ours.

So we know there are ways to prevent it. And of course what’s also routine is that somebody somewhere will comment and say, “Obama politicized this issue.” Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together. To the body politic.

I would ask news organizations, because I won’t put these facts forward — have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks in the last decade, and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side by side on your news reports.

This won’t be information coming from me, it will be coming from you.

We spent over a $1 trillion and passed countless laws and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?

This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America. We, collectively, are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.

When Americans are killed in mine disasters, we worked to make mines safer. When Americans are killed in floods and hurricanes we make communities safer. When roads are unsafe, we fix them, to reduce auto fatalities. We have seat belt laws because we know it saves lives

So the notion that gun violence is somehow difference, that our freedom and our constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon, when there are law abiding gun owners all across the country who could hunt and protect their families and everything do everything that they do under such regulations, doesn’t make sense.

 

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