John Lott: Obama's Gun Control Order is Dicatorial and It Won't Work

Dr. John Lott has this article over at National Review Online:

The current law is very clear. Only federally licensed gun dealers are required to conduct background checks, and only sellers whose “principal objective of livelihood and profit [is] the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms” are required to obtain a federal license. Anyone “who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms” is specifically exempted from the licensing requirement. 

But that doesn’t matter to Obama, whose actions today will require many sellers to get a license if they sell even a single gun. White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told reporters that licenses would now be required based on such things as, “whether you sell firearms shortly after they’re acquired or whether you buy or sell in the original packaging.” 

In an era when private individuals can set up their cell phones to accept credit cards, accepting credit-card payment for one gun will now make selling firearms your “principal objective of livelihood.”

Lott goes on to note that Obama doesn't have to rewrite laws related to background checks to make meaningful reforms, including fixing the system so that it does not continuously flag people who have no prohibiting convictions.  The gun ban lobby routinely sites that the system has stopped over 2 million people from purchasing a firearm without telling the rest of the story.  The government hasn't prosecuted those 2 million people for attempting to buy a firearm when they supposedly could not because 94% of those people initially stopped were done so erroneously.

None of the things announced today would have stopped the handful of mass shootings that happened in 2015.  The president's own spokesperson has acknowledged as much.