On the campaign trail in 2008, then-Senator Obama said he believes in people's Constitutional right to bear arms and promised to not take guns away from law abiding citizens, however, in President Obama's remarks on Thursday about the shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon, he suggested the U.S. should pass stringent laws restricting the right to own guns.
During a Sept. 9, 2008 campaign speech in Lebanon, Virginia, Obama told the crowd that he believes "in people's lawful right to bear arms."
"I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won't take your handgun away," Obama said.
"I just want to be absolutely clear. Alright, So I don't want any misunderstanding when you all go home and you are talking to your buddies and you say, ah 'He wants to take your guns away.' You've heard it here, I'm on television so everybody knows it. I believe in the Second Amendment."
Fast forward to Oct. 1, 2015, when, after a shooting occurred on Thursday at an Oregon community college that left nine people dead and nine wounded at the hands of a 26-year-old gunman, Obama said the following: "We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings; friends of ours, allies of ours – Great Britain, Australia – countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it. And of course what's also routine is that somebody somewhere will comment and say, 'Obama politicized this issue.' Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic."
Obama was referring to laws passed after mass shootings occurred in Great Britain and Australia in the 1990s. Both countries went on to enact legislation banning a number of different types of guns, with Australia also instituting a compulsory gun buy-back program for newly banned weapon, which confiscated over 600,000 weapons.
But as the Daily Mail has noted, after the final stage of the gun ban in Britain in 1997, which banned virtually all handguns, the total number of firearms offenses began to go up, increasing by 89 percent from 1998 to 2008. In 2009, the Daily Mail reported that Britain was "the most violent country in Europe," with a "worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa."
In Australia, researchers from the University of Melbourne concluded in 2008 that there is little evidence to suggest that the gun restrictions in Australia "had any significant effects on firearm homicides and suicides."
"In addition, there also does not appear to be any substitution effects - that reduced access to firearms may have led those bent on committing homicide or suicide to use alternative methods ... Although gun buybacks appear to be a logical and sensible policy that helps to placate the public's fears, the evidence so far suggests that in the Australian context, the high expenditure incurred to fund the 1996 gun buyback has not translated into any tangible reductions in terms of firearm deaths."
Even Time magazine wasn't able to fudge the statistics, citing Samara McPhedran, a University of Sydney academic who says the result of the gun ban is "in black and white."
"The hypothesis that the removal of a large number of firearms owned by civilians [would lead to fewer gun-related deaths] is not borne out by the evidence."
"What to conclude?" wrote The Wall Street Journal's Joyce Lee Malcolm. "Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven't made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don't provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems."
Even at home in the United States, Massachusetts - with a reputation as a bastion of gun control - wasn't able to curb gun violence with a comprehensive package of gun laws in 1998, according to the Boston Globe.
"Murders committed with firearms have increased significantly, aggravated assaults and robberies involving guns have risen, and gunshot injuries are up, according to FBI and state data," the newspaper said.
Yet for some reason, Obama has yet again flip-flopped on previous promises and now seems eager to infringe upon Second Amendment rights and enact similar gun control legislation.
