Nearly nine years after mocking “bitter” Americans who “cling to guns or religion,” President Obama used a column in the Harvard Law Review to assert that prayer in America is insufficient; America needs gun control.
Politico reports it was April 5, 2008, when Obama spoke to Democrat Party donors in San Francisco, saying:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
On January 5, 2017, he wrote in the Harvard Law Review:
But as I’ve said many times: “[O]ur thoughts and prayers are not enough.” They alone won’t “capture the heartache and grief and anger we should feel,” and they do “nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America.” We have a responsibility to act.
Obama went on to make clear that his emphasis on acting–on doing something–was an emphasis on passing more gun control:
Congress should pass the kinds of commonsense reforms supported by most of the American people–from investing in access to mental health care, to expanding background checks, to making it possible to keep guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists. The actions we take won’t prevent every act of violence–but if even one life is spared, they will have been well worth it.
He did not mention that the United States already has background checks, and such checks have proven to be mass attackers’ method of choice for acquiring firearms. Nor did he mention that all the hype about using no-fly lists to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists is just that: hype. After all, the San Bernardino attackers, the Orlando Pulse attacker, and the recent Ft. Lauderdale airport attacker were not on any such list.
Obama and Democrats’ methods, therefore, are not measures that will stop crime or make Americans safer.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at [email protected].
