Obama expanding gun sales checks
President’s executive order to increase enforcement but still doesn’t close gun-show loophole.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will announce Tuesday that he’ll act on his own authority to expand background checks for would-be gun buyers and increase enforcement of existing laws, a culmination of his effort to curb gun violence that nonetheless falls short of sweeping change he had long sought.
Though Obama is going around Congress again to make progress on a policy priority, he is limited in what he can legally do without proposing a legislative change.
His executive actions neither close the so-called gun-show loophole nor require universal background checks, two possibilities he had directed aides to explore amid a spate of mass shootings in the fall.
Obama plans to clarify federal law that allows for private gun sales without checking the backgrounds of the buyers, senior advisers said.
Anyone who makes a living from selling guns online or at gun shows, two locations where sellers are considered collectors or hobbyists and freed from the requirement that they conduct background checks, will be required to be federally licensed.
“We have to be very clear that this is not going to solve every violent crime in this country. It’s not going to prevent every mass shooting,” Obama said Monday.
But “It will potentially save lives and spare families the pain and extraordinary loss,” he said.
Most of the changes come through the president’s executive authority to direct changes in his agencies. The new guidelines governing private sales are a clarification of existing practices at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as the White House sees it.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Monday that her agency will put sellers on notice of the clarification and warn them that the definition of private sales is narrow.
The new guidance is consistent with existing law because it clarifies its original intent, according to Lynch and White House officials.
The hobbyist exemption in federal law was never meant to cover people devoting a significant amount of time and effort to selling guns just because they were doing so at a gun show, she said.
Obama said he believes his new initiatives are supported by the “overwhelming majority of the American people, including gun owners.”
Under the new reading of the rules, a person can be considered a dealer “engaged in the business of dealing in firearms” even if they only make a few sales.
The ATF will assess each case individually, said Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser involved in drafting the policy. She said agents will consider such qualifications as whether sellers represent themselves as dealers by taking credit card payments, handing out business cards, selling firearms quickly after acquiring them or selling them in the original packaging.
The FBI is overhauling the background check system to make it more efficient, with a new standard of trying to do background checks 24 hours a day, seven days a week.