Obama on guns, NIU violence
Posted: Friday, February 15, 2008 1:43 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ's Aswini Anburajan
It's rare that news of the day steps on the back and forth of the campaign trail, but the shootings at Northern Illinois University coupled with news that Vice President Cheney had weighed in on a congressional opposition to the District of Columbia's ban on guns had Obama clarifying his position on the second amendment this morning.
Asked to comment on Cheney's decision to add his signature to a brief supported by 55 senators and 250 congressmen to have the Supreme Court overturn a ban on handguns by the District of Columbia, Obama said he wasn't familiar with the statements made by either the Vice President or members of Congress.
However, he went on to defend the right of municipalities to establish their own handgun laws. "The city of Chicago has gun laws, so does Washington, D.C.," Obama said. "The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can't initiate gun safety laws to deal with gangbangers and random shootings on the street isn't born out by our constitution." Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty is an endorser of Obama.
Asked to elaborate on his understanding of what the second amendment actually means, Obama said that he does believe the second amendment "speaks to an individual's right." But he said that right could be "subject to common-sense regulation just like most of our rights are subject to common-sense regulation. So I think there's a lot of room before you [sic] bumping against a constitutional barrier for us to institute some of the common-sense gun laws."
In response to the crisis at Northern Illinois University, Obama said what the families were going through was unimaginable. He called for existing gun laws to be strengthened and pointed to a new law in California that allows authorities to trace bullets back to the guns they came from as a measure that both sides of the gun debate could potentially agree upon.
