The order President Barack Obama signed this week to reduce gun violence is likely to have minimal effect. There is little the president can do himself to change gun laws, and Congress has proven incapable of taking any action.
Much attention has focused on the small change the president ordered regarding background checks. His order is meant to clarify that anyone “engaged in the business of dealing in firearms” must conduct background checks. The intent is to make background checks on Internet gun sales more common, but the executive order doesn’t define “engaged in the business,” so it remains unclear how many additional sales would be subject to background checks. Under the president’s order, the federal government would devote more money and personnel to processing background checks.
The president came nowhere close to closing what is known as the gun show loophole. Instead, he just made it a tiny bit smaller. Still, opponents of stricter gun control were harshly critical. “I am adamantly opposed to President Obama conducting any attack on our Second Amendment rights,” Rep. Bruce Poliquin said in a statement before the president even detailed his plans.
Likely, the most important piece of the president’s new policies is the memo to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and the U.S. attorney general, directing them to study smart gun technology. This is important for two reasons. First, this technology has the potential to reduce murders, accidental shootings and suicides. Second, it sends the strong message that researching guns and gun violence is not only acceptable, but encouraged.
For decades there has been a chill on gun research. In 1996, Congress passed a budget provision prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using federal funds to “advocate for or promote gun control” and later expanded the provision to include the National Institutes of Health. To prevent criticism from groups such as the NRA, agencies interpreted the prohibition to forbid nearly all types of research into gun violence. A backer of the original legislation now says it was a mistake.
“If we had somehow gotten the research going, we could have somehow found a solution to the gun violence without there being any restrictions on the Second Amendment,” former Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Arkansas, told the Huffington Post in October. “We could have used that all these years to develop the equivalent of that little small fence,” he said, referring to highway barriers now in place to reduce crashes.
The statistics are well known: Mass shootings, defined as events in which four or more people are killed, are exponentially more common in the U.S. than in other developed countries. Suicides are more common in homes where guns are present and in states with high gun ownership rates. Women who are victims of domestic violence are eight times more likely to be killed by their partner if there is a gun in the home. In 2013, guns accounted for nearly as many U.S. deaths — more than 60 percent of them suicides — as motor vehicle traffic: 33,636 vs. 33,804, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And, perhaps most disturbing of all, a toddler shoots someone on a weekly basis in the U.S.
Smart gun technology has existed for years, but protests — and even death threats — have prevented its deployment in the United States. With smart technology, guns could only be fired by a recognized owner. Stolen guns would be unusable; accidental shootings would decline. Guns already have been developed that can only be fired when in close proximity to a special watch. Research into fingerprint scan technology use in firearms is ongoing.
As Obama notes in his memo, the U.S. government is the largest purchaser of firearms. If it demands smart technology, the market will respond and adapt.
