Hillary Clinton's gun control plan includes both legislation and executive actions
Hillary Clinton. JStone / Shutterstock.com
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has taken a strong stand in favor of gun control in the wake of last week’s deadly mass shooting at a college in Oregon.
On Monday, Clinton released her plan to curb gun violence on her campaign website, and promised that if she were elected, she would use her executive powers to bypass Congress if necessary.
According to Vox, Clinton has previously supported renewing the expired assault weapons ban, as well as expanding background checks. Her new proposals include ending the gun industry’s immunity from civil liability, closing the so-called Charleston loophole that allows gun purchases to proceed if a background check isn’t completed within three days, and prohibiting convicted domestic abusers from buying guns.
Clinton also advocated closing the gun-show and Internet sales loopholes and vowed that if Congress failed to act, she would use her executive power to force private individuals who sell a “significant number of guns” to register with the federal government as licensed dealers who must perform background checks. The campaign says this could be accomplished by way of a new rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms more clearly defining what it means to be in the business of selling firearms, the Washington Post reports. Such a federal regulation could be changed through an executive action, the campaign says.
Arkadi Gerney, a gun policy expert at the Center for American Progress, told the Post that her proposal to use executive action to close the gun-show loophole could be valid. “The statute says that anyone engaged in the business of selling firearms must apply for a federal license. Like any other statute where it’s vague, there’s the potential to define it further. You could update the regulation and have a more clear threshold. You couldn’t say, we define ‘engaged in the business’ as anyone who sells a gun ever. But you could change the regulation to be more focused, more narrow, and less vague than it currently is, which makes it very hard to prosecute people who abuse the law and are selling tens and hundreds of guns as private sellers.”
