Much Sound and Fury and Tears, Signifying Pretty Much Nothing

Obama's grand pronouncements of executive Orders on gun control have resulted in a solid "Meh", while his supporters are giddy that he "did something". As Édouard Daladier once said of others celebrating in such circumstances "Ah, the fools! Why are they cheering?"

Why indeed? All the promises of swift and terrible executive action and we get platitudes and orders that practically just restate existing law.

His "dealer" executive order doesn't change the law much if at all from what it is now, except to possibly expose private sellers to some more jeopardy when to go to sell their firearms should someone consider them to be "in business" at the time. All the rest of the sturm und drang, and all of his beating his chest about doing something regarding that executive order is for stuff that is already the law. Dealers whether at a gun show or otherwise still must do a background check and its been that way long before Obama. That he and his staffers didn't know that speaks volumes. That he counts on his base not to know that and to fete him accordingly speaks volumes about them (Rochelle Riley in the Free Press for example - she clearly doesn't know what the law currently is, but is cheering Obama raucously over his "doing something").

The Executive Order on 41P gets rid of CLEO sign-off for NFA items, which is a definite plus, while burdening Trusts, corporations, partnerships and other corporate entities with having the "responsible person" for that entity undergo fingerprinting and photos for a background check.

Note that 41P is a measure dealing with a rather complete non-issue. There's been a rather complete lack of any actual crimes committed by legal NFA owners with NFA items, including no crimes with NFA items owned by trusts. This "solution" for a non-existent problem will result in, the

ATF estimates a total additional cost of $29.4 million annually for trusts and legal entities to gather, procure, and submit such information to ATF and for ATF to process the information and conduct background checks on responsible persons.

So, there will be at least $29.4 million wasted for a measure for something that has not even been demonstrated to be an actual problem. This is not good, but we saw 41P one coming for awhile and the lack of CLEO sign off is a net plus.

All in all, Obama phoned this one in with a few false tears and his base ate it up, while it did very little indeed to change the status quo. I was expecting something far more overbearing and drastic and instead we got this.