White House Support



The Obama Administration supports repealing the Tiahrt Amendment restrictions. The following appears on the White House website:

"Address Gun Violence in Cities: Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade."
--Excerpt from the Obama Administration’s Agenda for Urban Policy

 

Watch then-candidate Obama answer a question about gun violence.

Download video of President Obama's campaign statement on the Tiahrt trace data restrictions from the January 15, 2008 debate in Las Vegas (MP4)

Transcript

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Tim Russert?

TIM RUSSERT: We arrived in Nevada, the headline in Nevada Appeal newspaper: Nevada leads in gun deaths.

The leading cause for death amongst young black men is guns — death, homicide. Mayor Bloomberg of New York, you all know him, he and 250 mayors have started the campaign, Mayors Against Illegal Guns…

Senator Obama, when you were in the state senate, you talked about licensing and registering guns and gun owners. Would you do that as president?

BARACK OBAMA: I don’t think that we can get that done. But what I do think we can do is to provide just some common-sense enforcement. One good example — this is consistently blocked — the efforts by law enforcement to obtain the information required to trace back guns that have been used in crimes to unscrupulous gun dealers.

That’s not something that the NRA has allowed to get through Congress. And, as president, I intend to make it happen.

But here’s the broader context that I think is important for us to remember. We essentially have two realities, when it comes to guns, in this country. You’ve got the tradition of lawful gun ownership, that all of us saw, as we travel around rural parts of the country.

And it is very important for many Americans to be able to hunt, fish, take their kids out, teach them how to shoot.

And 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.