Principles that Obama supports on gun issues:
- Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.
- Increase state restrictions on the purchase and possession of firearms.
- Require manufacturers to provide child-safety locks with firearms.
Source: 1998 IL State Legislative National Political Awareness Test Jul 2, 1998
Q: When you were in the state senate, you talked about licensing and registering gun owners. Would you do that as president?
A: I don’t think that we can get that done. ed: (but presumably if he could he would) But what we can do is to provide just some common-sense enforcement. The efforts by law enforcement to obtain the information required to trace back guns that have been used in crimes to unscrupulous gun dealers. As president, I intend to make it happen. We essentially have two realities, when it comes to guns, in this country. You’ve got the tradition of lawful gun ownership. It is very important for many Americans to be able to hunt, fish, take their kids out, teach them how to shoot. Then you’ve got the reality of 34 Chicago public school students who get shot down on the streets of Chicago. We can reconcile those two realities by making sure the Second Amendment is respected and that people are able to lawfully own guns, but that we also start cracking down on the kinds of abuses of firearms that we see on the streets.