Which Republican Candidate Hates Obama's Gun-Control Effort the Most?
President Obama is currently starting one last effort for gun control, in his final year in office. Sometime in the next two weeks, he is expected announce an executive order to require more small gun sellers to do background checks, and he plans to pitch that idea and other gun-control measures to the American public at a CNN-televised town hall Thursday.
None of this is sitting well with our Republican candidates for president—almost all of them decried Obama’s proposed actions this weekend, with varying degrees of cogency.
Leading candidate Donald Trump, as is his custom, said on CNN this morning the thing that will scare the Republican base the most: “Pretty soon, you won’t be able to get guns. I mean, it’s another step in the way of not getting guns.”
Sen. Marco Rubio and Bush son Jeb Bush each performed a slightly more restrained version of Trump’s response. Rubio told New Hampshire supporters yesterday, “All these executive orders [Obama’s] gonna come out with tomorrow that are going to undermine our Second Amendment rights—on my first day in office, they’re gone.” Bush told Fox News, “[Obama’s] first impulse always is to take rights away from law-abiding citizens, and it’s wrong.”
Carly Fiorina offered CNN a word salad that managed to include global warming and ISIS. “It is delusional, dangerous, not to mention unconstitutional, for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to continue talking about climate change and gun control in the wake of a Paris terrorist attack, in the wake of a San Bernardino terrorist attack, instead of how we can defeat ISIS,” she said.
Sen. Ted Cruz is simply offering voters a chance to win a shotgun engraved with his logo.
#CruzCrew: You can win this specially engraved shotgun -- enter today: https://t.co/J1UlPeaTfw pic.twitter.com/UaIOdnq84H
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) January 3, 2016
Finally, Gov. Chris Christie—who is currently polling around 3 percent—offered the most delusional response of all. “Now his president wants to act as if he is a king, as if he is a dictator,” he told Fox News yesterday. “...This is going to be another illegal executive action, which I’m sure will be rejected by the courts and when I become President will be stricken from executive action by executive action I’ll take.”
(Chris Christie is not going to become president.)
