Let us assume this is him, it sounds like him.
Obama has a silver tongue, even I can enjoy hearing him.
This is a guy that voted for every single piece of gun control legislation until he was elected president. His record is public.
It is also a guy that was on the board of directors for the Joyce foundation, a major funding source of anti gun efforts.
You don't act as a board member and not know the strategy.
He is a very smooth politician. In that article he talks about strengthening the so called veterans disarmament act, the legislation passed 4 years ago he references. No longer relying on states to submit info to arbitrarily deny people that have broken no laws the right to guns. That is considered unacceptable, not enough.
He mentions encouraging and rewarding states that provide info to do so. How does the federal government reward states? That is a financial incentive to provide info on people in order to prohibit them. Remember this only applies to people who are not felons, or they would be prohibited already.
He is also talking about the "gunshow loophole" which has little to do with gunshows and outlaws all private sales.
Government then can keep track of every gun ever legally transferred anywhere.
As long as there is private sales there will always by a thorn in the side of a government that wants to be able to control and monitor the means to arms.
While nobody wants dangerous psychos to have guns, psychology is also very discretionary, and adding significant legal teeth to arbitrary discretionary opinions is a dangerous scenario. It undoes a lot of the intended protections our criminal justice system is designed to give.
It may prevent some problems, but it will also be used to prevent rights far more often when there never would have been any problems.
Every member of society has the symptoms of various mental problems, it is just the opinion of a licensed professional whether those are significant enough to actually be something, or "normal". That discretion can be used to determine whether an individual is banned from ever exercising a protected right or not.
The thing is like he said some of these things are already "passed", he just wants to create new programs and databases and federal regulations and increased funding based on such legislation.
Obama is one of the smoothest talkers I have seen. He knows how to avoid keywords that will polarize one side or the other.
If they can defang the pro-gun side and get them to start thinking "reasonable" the momentum of "reasonable" will begin. It will be what I mentioned above, and it will continue. Another big one they have focused on since the Tucson incident is capacity limits.
That would be coming if they felt they got enough gun owners in a compromise mindset.
Each time the antis get something a new topic is on the front lines of your gun rights and the lost right typically stays lost. The sunset on the AWB was a stroke of fortune, if it had not ended when the congress that was in place was in place it would have been permanently renewed.
Everything is "reasonable" and a sound logical argument can be made to implement almost any new anti-gun restriction if you get a good enough speaker. You have to decide to either deal with freedom and some risk, or let the government take absolute control and turn the exercising of your rights into an extensive bureaucratic process.
Many politicians would love to follow the model of some European states where many places have extensive requirements for gun ownership, tiered licenses, time requirements of belonging to expensive clubs before someone can own X gun, time requirements of owning X gun before someone can own Y type gun, etc etc
The whole system is so cumbersome, all based on "common sense" that the percentage of people that go through the trouble is a small fraction of society. The result is it gets even easier to take future gun rights because the number of gun rights supporters dwindles and grows slowly because it is such a chore to even join the the ranks of gun owners. It becomes a downward spiral, more gun control reduces gun owners over time, which makes it easier to pass even more gun control.
The biggest irony of all is that the founders added the 2nd as a potential check against tyranny from the very government that wants absolute and complete control to grant or deny the right to arms, and complete control ( and resulting documentation created) on the transfer of all arms.
