Taya Kyle, the widow of Chris Kyle — Navy SEAL and subject of the movie “American Sniper” — asked President Obama a question that left him stuttering Thursday night during CNN’s gun control town hall.
“I understand that background checks aren’t necessarily going to stop me from getting a gun,” she said. “But I also know that wouldn’t have stopped any of the people here in this room from killing. It almost seems like a false sense of hope.”
Kyle asked Obama why his administration wasn’t more optimistic about the murder rate being at an all-time low.
“Why not celebrate where we are?”she asked. “Celebrate that we’re good people and, 99.9 percent, most of us are never going to kill anyone.”
Obama stuttered and rambled through a lengthy response that led him to talk about how his new executive actions to increase gun control aren’t ultimately helping catch criminals who purchase weapons illegally.
“Now people are using cut-out trusts and shell corporations to purchase the most dangerous weapons: sawed off shot guns, automatic weapons, silencers — and don’t have to go through background checks at all,” he said. “We don’t know if these sales are going to drug traffickers. We don’t know who is purchasing them right now. And so what we’re saying is, ‘You know what? That is something we’ve got to do something about.'”
Obama concluded his answer with one of his favorite talking points — that a large number of people who “are buying guns online” have felony records. The problem is that it’s already illegal for felons to purchase guns, nor can anyone purchase a gun from a website without first completing a background check.
Obama’s executive actions won’t make felons “purchasing guns online” any more illegal than it already is. From Obama’s response, it sounds like he knows stricter gun laws won’t be able to stop the criminals who are purchasing the most dangerous types of weapons.
