President Obama launched the country’s biggest push on gun control in decades Wednesday, rolling out wide-ranging plans that include 23 executive actions. The president also pressed Congress to reinstate the assault weapons ban and called for background checks for all gun sales to prevent another mass shooting like the one in December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Needless to say, Obama’s gun control measures were met with resistance by the Republican Party.

CNN:

While some of the steps he proposed are given little chance of winning congressional approval in the face of the nation’s powerful gun lobby, Obama said all efforts must be made to reduce chronic gun violence in the country.

…Republicans immediately rejected the Obama proposals as an attack on the constitutional right to bear arms.

“Nothing the president is proposing would have stopped the massacre at Sandy Hook,” said a statement by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, considered an up-and-coming GOP leader. “President Obama is targeting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens instead of seriously addressing the real underlying causes of such violence.”

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— Posted by Tracy Bloom.