WASHINGTON — Alaska's congressional delegation showed strong opposition to President Barack Obama's plan to curb gun violence by tightening gun control laws.
Rep. Don Young said that Tuesday, when Obama formally announced his plans, will go down in history "as one of the saddest days in America, in Alaska especially."
And Sen. Dan Sullivan said he was "extremely troubled" by Obama's use of his executive powers to try to reduce gun violence, calling it "a direct affront to our Constitution."
Blocked by a Republican-controlled Congress staunchly opposed to enacting new gun laws, Obama announced plans Tuesday to take action through federal agencies under existing laws. The plan takes aim at gun sales that evade background checks — both online and by using corporate fronts — and by encouraging more reporting of the names of mentally ill people to the national background check database. And through new hiring, Obama hopes to speed up the process for background checks that allow legal gun sales.
"I am very troubled that the President thinks gun control can effectively be achieved through executive decree. I want to keep Americans safe, and I agree that we need to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable. But we must ensure any solution does not compromise our Second Amendment rights," Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Tuesday.
None of the three members of Alaska's congressional delegation said specifically how Obama's plans would undermine the Second Amendment, though they all said they are concerned that's where Obama is heading.
Young pledged to put a stop to Obama's call for more federal agents focused on gun control enforcement, presumably using congressional budget powers. And he said he's concerned that expanding the definition of who is a "seller" required to obtain a gun dealer license and perform background checks could mean adding legal requirements for someone selling a gun to a family member.
Just how much impact Obama's plans will have on Alaska remains to be seen — aside from potentially faster background checks. The rules would expand who is considered a firearms dealer — and thus required to run background checks, though not necessarily to those who occasionally sell a gun to a relative. But efforts to expand mental health records in the background check database are likely to fall flat with no federal requirement to submit information about mentally ill people.
Since a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut shocked the nation in 2012, states have added more than 2 million mentally ill people to the database, but Alaska has submitted only 53 people, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group that tracks FBI statistics. Nationwide, more than a million people were denied a gun purchase between Nov. 30, 1998, and the end of 2015, according to FBI statistics. Less than 2 percent of those were because of mental health issues. Most denials are related to criminal records.
Gun sellers in Alaska rely entirely on the federal background check system — they ran 85,621 background checks in 2015, according to the FBI.
Meanwhile, Alaska leads the nation in both gun ownership and gun-related deaths.
More than 60 percent of Alaska homes have guns, putting the state just behind Wyoming and Montana, according to a 2015 U.S. National Vital Statistics Report produced by the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation. Other studies rank Alaska number one in percentage of homes with guns.
That same Kaiser Foundation study, which uses data from 2013, ranks the state number one in the nation for rate of gun deaths — 19.8 people per 100,000 residents annually.
Obama's action was chiefly motivated by the continued mass shootings that have taken place during his time in office. "Fort Hood. Binghamton. Aurora. Oak Creek. Newtown. The Navy Yard. Santa Barbara. Charleston. San Bernardino," Obama said, listing towns that faced recent mass shootings.
"We can all agree that the recent violence in this country has been both heartbreaking and tragic," Young said, but he argued that most proposals "would do little to prevent them because those determined to commit evil, including criminals and the mentally ill, continue to break our laws." Young said Tuesday, however, that he is not opposed to mental health checks for gun buys.
"Alaskans are horrified by murders carried out by criminals and terrorists, such as what happened in San Bernardino, CA," Sullivan wrote. "But we understand that whittling away our right to bear arms and keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens is not the way to prevent these tragedies."
Obama's announcement has not been well received in the Republican Party, which has denounced it as an attack on Second Amendment rights, which Murkowski called "non-negotiable."
"Many Alaskans depend on the Second Amendment to safeguard their way of life, whether it's for personal protection, subsistence, or sports and recreation," she said Tuesday.
In an emotional speech from the White House Tuesday, Obama argued that the characterization is incorrect, saying, "this is not a plot to take away everybody's guns."
"I believe in the Second Amendment," he said. "No matter how many times people try to twist my words around — I taught constitutional law, I know a little about this — I get it. But I also believe that we can find ways to reduce gun violence consistent with the Second Amendment."
But Young appeared to discount Obama's words. He said the president is "really trying to do is disarm the citizenry of America."
Instead, Obama "should be focused on effectively enforcing existing laws," Young said.
But enforcement is just one part of Obama's newest effort to work around Congress. Multiple government agencies will get in on the gun control action during Obama's last year in office.
The Social Security Administration will begin making new rules that would enable it to enter beneficiaries barred from having a gun for mental health reasons into the background check system.
The Department of Health and Human Services has a regulation already in the works aimed at removing legal barriers that keep states from reporting information about people who can't own a gun for mental health reasons. That includes a new regulation finished Monday that allows health care providers to report names of mentally ill patients to the FBI background check system.
The main thrust of action will come through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), through measures meant to expand background check requirements to dealers that operate online — a "loophole" in current policy.
The ATF is working on a new regulation that would keep people from buying machine guns and sawed-off shotguns through trusts and corporations that allow them to avoid background checks. According to the White House, applications to purchase guns this way have risen dramatically — from fewer than 900 applications in 2000 to more than 90,000 applications in 2009.
Meanwhile, the FBI plans to boost the speed of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System by hiring 230 new staffers to process background checks, a 50 percent increase to the workforce. The FBI will also continue efforts to modernize the system, with hopes of eventually processing background checks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The FBI conducts background checks for firearms in Alaska, as it does for 28 other states. Nationwide, about 1.8 percent of the 2.1 million applications to buy a gun were denied between 1994 and 2010, most commonly due to prior felony convictions, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
"Today, background checks are required at gun stores. If a father wants to teach his daughter how to hunt, he can walk into a gun store, get a background check, purchase his weapon safely and responsibly," Obama said.
Obama also hopes to work with the private sector on technology to help track stolen guns and prevent unsupervised use by children, he said Tuesday.
The president's announcement also included several requests for Congress, though he acknowledged Tuesday that significant change is unlikely. "It won't happen during this Congress. It won't happen during my presidency," the president said.
In his upcoming budget request for fiscal year 2017, Obama plans to ask for funding for 200 new ATF agents to enforce existing gun laws, and for $500 million to increase access to mental health care.
In his speech Tuesday, Obama lamented the partisan divide over gun control.
"How did we get here? How did we get to the place where people think requiring a comprehensive background check means taking away people's guns?" he asked.
But Murkowski argued that Obama is "no friend of practical bipartisan solutions to the gun violence problem, and he is no friend of the Second Amendment." She cited the president's rejection of Republican-offered efforts, including a bill she supported in 2013, and mental health legislation that she cosponsored in 2015. The mental health bill is aimed at expanding and easing access to treatment.
The 2013 bill was offered by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ted Cruz, R-Texas — one of several gun control bills that failed to pass the Senate in the wake of the December 2012 murders
of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
"Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad," Obama said Tuesday.
Obama's preferred legislation, which also failed, would have required background checks for all gun sales except those among family and friends. It was a bipartisan proposal offered by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Patrick Toomey, R-Penn.
The Grassley-Cruz bill, which Murkowski supported, did not expand background checks to gun shows and the Internet, but did require federal courts to submit relevant mental health information to the national background check system, and offered incentives for states to do so.
"The president claims that he's acting because Congress 'has failed' to do so. Nothing can be farther from the truth," Sullivan said. "Congress has acted. We have listened to the people we represent who soundly reject the President's overreach."
On Thursday, Obama will hold a "town hall" meeting in Virginia that will be shown live on CNN.