Obama: Kalamazoo Shootings Show Executive Gun Controls Didn’t Go Far Enough

On Monday President Obama called Kalamazoo area law enforcement and intimated the Saturday shootings that took six lives demonstrate that executive gun control did not go far enough, saying, “We’re going to have to do more to keep Americans safe.”

Breitbart News previously reported that a 45-year-old Uber driver named Jason Brian Dalton allegedly shot and killed six people and wounded two or three others in between fares on Saturday night. The Journal-News reported that Dalton “has no known criminal history” and the Daily Mail reported he has no history of mental illness. Because of this, Dalton “passed a background check” to drive for Uber. If these reports are accurate, there is no reason why he would have been prohibited from passing a background check to purchase a firearm.

Yet Obama sees an opportunity for more gun control.

According to The Hill, Obama told Kalamazoo area law enforcement, “I’ve got to assume that all of you are just as tired as I am of seeing this stuff happen in your states.  So that’s an area where we need to partner and think about what we can do in a commonsense way, in a bipartisan way, without some of the ideological rhetoric that so often surrounds that issue.”

Here is the problem–a person with no criminal  or mental illness history is not forbidden from buying a firearm. And that is why so many people who intend evil but have never committed evil are able to go into a retail store and buy a gun. And such people always will be able to do so, because background checks look at the past, they do not predict the future. This is why North Carolina’s New Hanover County Sheriff Sgt. Jerry Brewer points out that background checks cannot stop latent criminals, only actual ones.

Because of this, both Fort Hood gunmen–Ivan Lopez in 2014 and Nidal Hasan in 2009–passed background checks for their guns. James Holmes–the Aurora theater gunman–passed background checks for his guns, as did alleged Lafayette theater gunman John Russell Houser, Virginia gunman Vester Lee Flanagan, Umpqua Community College gunman Chris Harper Mercer, Santa Barbara gunman Elliot Rodger, and Gabby Giffords’ attacker Jared Loughner, among many others.

By using persons with no criminal or mental history as an impetus for more gun control, Obama is demonstrating a clear determination to leave the Second Amendment in tatters in January, 2017.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.