On Jan. 5, President Barack Obama held a press conference at the White House to unveil his executive orders dealing with gun violence.
“We do have to feel a sense of urgency about it,” Obama said. “In Dr. King’s words, we need to feel the ‘fierce urgency of now.’ Because people are dying. And the constant excuses for inaction no longer do, no longer suffice.”
According to Dr. Steven Breezeel, associate professor of political science, executive orders have played a part in American politics since its inception.
“Fundamentally, what they represent are instructions given by the president to members of the bureaucracy or administrative side of government in terms of their actions to carry out the law,” Breezeel said. “It’s much like the direction a manager would give to an employee. The idea of an executive order is an implied power.”
The executive orders outlined in Obama’s speech include requiring all firearms retailers to run background checks on all customers; hiring more people to work in the FBI’s background check system to strengthen the existing gun laws; sending all mental health records to the background check system to protect the mentally ill, and developing new gun safety technologies.
According to senior Chord Cantrell, a public administration major, these executive orders could potentially alienate several groups of voters, especially in the south.
“I was born in Arkansas and raised in Arkansas,” Cantrell said. “Where I’m from, everybody carries, everybody goes hunting, everybody just knows how to use a gun. Around here in the south, it aggravates everybody every time something is done — whether it’s just a minute tweak of a background check or something as drastic as banning clips that hold more than 10 rounds. All the gun control legislation is doing is taking guns out of the hands of people who know how to use them and are good people who don’t do any harm. If you are looking at where the shootings are taking place and the places with the highest concentration of gun violence and criminal activity, they are in the states with the highest regulations on guns.”
Senior Jennifer Wright said she supports gun control.
“I want gun control because I love the idea of a free country,” Wright said. “I love the idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I think every life is worthy of protection, and I don’t think we should make it easy for anyone to take another’s life. I think people’s civil liberties should cease to exist the second they intend harm.”
Breezeel said that while the executive orders aim to reduce the number of mass shootings, they would not have had any effect in some violent shooter events.
“The guy that bought the guns and then transferred them illegally under current law passed a background check and most of the shooters would have passed a background check,” Breezeel. “The criticism is that these are policies that have been on the wish list for advocates of gun control for a long time but they themselves wouldn’t have any bearing on any of the recent shootings that have happened in the U.S.”
Obama, however, said he firmly believes that this batch of executive orders are worth implementing.
“Each time this comes up, we are fed the excuse that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that, so why bother trying,” Obama said in the press conference. “I reject that thinking. We know we can not stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.”
