WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will meet with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch on Monday to discuss what he can do to curb gun violence, sidestepping an entrenched Congress.
In his first weekly radio address of the new year on Friday, Obama said he would talk to Lynch after a monthslong examination of the measures he can take on his own to halt what he called “our epidemic of gun violence.”
Recalling the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 26 people — 20 of them children — and left many grimly hopeful it would initiate a change in the nation’s gun laws, the president criticized lawmakers for bowing to the gun lobby and blocking necessary reforms.
“All across America, survivors of gun violence and those who lost a child, a parent, a spouse to gun violence are forced to mark such awful anniversaries every single day,” Obama said. “And yet Congress still hasn’t done anything to prevent what happened to them from happening to other families.”
The speech is an explicit return to a theme that Obama has downplayed in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris that killed 130 on Nov. 13 and 14 more on Dec. 2 in San Bernardino, California, both of which were inspired by Islamic extremism. While Obama’s initial response to the San Bernardino event emphasized its commonality with other mass shootings and the need for gun restrictions, the administration soon realized that this message was failing to reassure Americans that he was taking seriously enough the threat from Islamic extremism and the Islamic State.
So through much of December, Obama engaged in a series of public events to convince Americans that his administration was doing everything it could to battle the Islamic State. For some Americans, being vigilant against Islamic extremism involves having more guns, not fewer, and sales of guns surged in the wake of the San Bernardino attack.
The administration sees such a response as counterproductive not only because the number of deaths from gun suicides and routine shootings is far greater than those from terror attacks, but also because the country’s availability of weapons makes terror attacks far easier to conduct here. Rather than fight both the anxiety about Islamic extremism and the need for more gun restrictions at the same time, however, Obama focused on calming the nation.
Now, a month after the San Bernardino attacks, Obama has decided that he can return to his focus on gun measures. “Because I get too many letters from parents, and teachers, and kids, to sit around and do nothing,” Obama said in his speech released Friday.
A bipartisan effort in 2013 to bolster gun control measures after the Newtown shooting was halted in the Senate, failing to garner the 60 votes needed to expand background checks and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Facing the reality that lawmakers are unlikely to strengthen the country’s gun laws anytime soon, the administration has been looking at ways Obama can tighten gun sales unilaterally, focusing in particular on who could be considered a high-volume dealer for an executive action that could expand background checks.
But White House officials have said there are many political and legal challenges to doing so, potentially opening up Obama to renewed criticism that he is abusing his authority.
The president’s announcement comes less than two weeks before his final State of the Union speech on Jan. 12, addressing “one piece of unfinished business,” as Obama called it Friday.
