The loudest response to President Obama’s executive action on gun control has unsurprisingly come from Second Amendment advocates on the right, seeing their worst fears realized in the form of required background checks for online and gun show customers. Republican presidential candidates decried it; Governor John Kaisch said the mandate was “poisoning the well” of relations between lawmakers, and Ben Carson tweeted that the law would only target the freedom of law-abiding citizens. This was to be expected. There was also a fair amount of hand-wringing from centrists concerned about executive overreach by the president, who side-stepped Congress to push through the most meaningful gun control legislation of the century.

  “An abuse of power!” cried many. But was Obama not acting on behalf of the people, something Congress has been unable and unwilling to do?

  A Republican Congress stagnated by the money of the gun lobby has struck down countless “common sense” gun control proposals like the universal background check, even through a horrific 2015 in which America saw more mass shootings than days (mass shootings defined here as an incident in which four or more people were shot). By the new year, witnesses to the carnage had passed the point of indignant outrage at the inaction of our representatives in Washington, on to a more reluctant complacency.

  To realize how dysfunctional this democracy is, see that it takes executive action to achieve the will of the people. A CBS/New York Times poll from Oct. found that 92 percent of Americans, and 87 percent of Republicans favored requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers. Who is really working for us, a Congress who claims to be speaking for Middle America but actually serves the pocketbooks funding their campaigns, or a president who seems to know that democracy is literally defined as the “rule of the people?”

  Mass shootings have reached an epidemic level, and many of our politicians seem to want to just let it all play out. “Stuff happens,” as Jeb Bush put it after nine people were killed with legally bought guns at Umpqua Community College, seems to be the mantra. But political inertia is not an acceptable way to deal with this country’s problems, and as long as we allow our politicians to be bought and sold by corporations, their heels will only dig deeper into the ground.

  “What I didn’t fully appreciate, and nobody can appreciate until they’re in the position, is how decentralized power is in this system,” Obama told GQ at the end of last year. Without a like-minded congress, the president has faced strong opposition to the vision he brought to the campaign trail in 2008. He has been plagued by a drastic partisan split that countered many of his administration’s goals, but has muscled through legislation that will form the backbone of his legacy--the stimulus, healthcare and now the beginnings of gun reform. Obama seemed to be the charismatic, left wing beacon to lift America out of the darkness of two wars and an economic recession eight years ago. With a year to go in his presidency, Obama now looks like that light from 2008. Is this what democracy in action feels like?

Sam Kayuha

Columbus