Oct 25, 2019 By Richard Robbins 4 min read

“I like taking guns away early,” the president of the United States said. “Take guns first, go through due process later.”

President Barack Obama had a way of stating things that often went to the heart of the matter. But a call to upend the basic tenants of the American justice system – the constitutional guarantee of a day in court with the right to confront your accuser? No wonder the National Rifle Association – all in when it comes to protecting gun owner rights – worried so about the 44th president.

Where was he taking the country? Down the road to gun confiscations, that’s where. As the NRA’s Chris Cox said, “Barack Obama and John Kerry tried to force” gun control down the throats of law-abiding Americans. “But Donald Trump has said, ‘Not on my watch.'”

But, wait, these are not Barack Obama’s words. They belong to Trump himself, spoken in February 2018 in the wake of the high school shooting at Parkland, Fla.

He made his remarks to a bipartisan gathering of lawmakers in the Cabinet room of the White House. It was on this occasion that President Trump said that Republican members of Congress were politically “petrified” of the NRA.

Reminded by Connecticut’s Democratic senator Chris Murphy that the gun lobby was likely to object to stricter background checks for gun purchasers, the president said, in effect, bring it on. He welcomed the responsibility. The responsibility was his, he told Murphy and the others.

“We can’t wait and play games and nothing gets done,” he said. He wanted a “terrific bill” on his desk for signing.

In August of this year, in the wake of mass shootings in Ohio and Texas, the president again called for enhanced measures. Donald Trump tweeted, “Very strong improvement and strengthening of background checks will be fully backed by the White House.”

Of course, nothing happened to close the so-called “gun show loophole.” However, the president did successfully support a ban on bumper stocks, the devices which allow semiautomatic rifles to be fired more rapidly.

The change in the federal regulation of the apparatus came in the wake of the massacre in Las Vegas in which hundreds were injured and 58 persons were killed by a gunman using multiple bumper stock modified rifles.

The ban was endorsed by the NRA. In a statement, the organization’s executive director, Chris Cox, noted the Obama administration twice endorsed the sale of bumper stocks.

Under the Trump administration directive, bumper stocks owners were given the option of destroying the devices themselves or turning them in to federal regulators.

Several Sundays ago, the Herald Standard’s Mike Tony reported, “Fear of safety threats in public or at home hasn’t been the only alarm triggering local gun sales.

“Fear of who’s in the White House has influenced gun sales, too.”

Tony’s story detailed the spike in local gun sales during the Obama years and the corresponding decline with Donald Trump in the White House.

Gun shop owner Buddy Marra told the paper, “When Obama was first running, sales went through the roof.”

The “Trump slump” has cost shop owners and gun manufacturers plenty in cash receipts. Obama was good for sales, Trump has been bad.

How is this possible, given the records of the two administrations. It must be something other than the cold hard facts.

For sure, the Obama administration issued more than two dozen executive orders pertaining to guns, including several which expanded the rights of gun owners, such as allowing the holstering of handguns in federal parks.

(By the way, requiring that pistols be placed in the glove compartments of locked vehicles on federal park lands was a policy advanced by the conservative Reagan administration.)

So, what’s going on here? Surely the answer lies in the murky intersection of culture and politics. It’s just not coincidental to the squabble over guns that the Democratic Party is increasingly urban while Republican strength resides in the countryside.

At one time, the parties had constituents in both places. Overlapping constituencies was a better idea than today’s urban-rural divide.

Then again, who said this? “If you’ve got a rifle, if you’ve got a shotgun, if you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking that away…. We have a strong tradition of gun ownership that’s handed down from generation to generation. Hunting and shooting are part of our national heritage.”

Did you think the answer was Trump? Wrong. Obama.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.