A little debate erupted on whether executive actions are the same as executive orders after President Obama announced his executive actions on guns this week.
While some executive orders rub me the wrong way, executive actions are the correct thing for a president to be executing, depending on how you define, "executive action." It is for Congress to make the laws, and if executive orders are laws being made, I don't like that.
But, executive actions? If these are just measures you are taking to enforce the laws, then you are merely fulfilling your obligation to execute the law. That's what the executive branch is suppose to do.
Hiring more people to do background checks is not an executive order, but an executive action. Modernizing background-check methods is not the creation of new law. Rather, it is how you make the existing law function.
With some of the things President Obama proposed, it depends on what is already on the books, which I am not knowledgeable about. When he said, anyone who sells guns -- whether at gun shows, on the Internet, or wherever -- must get a license and conduct background checks, I assume that is something already on the books, it is just that he is going to see that it is enforced.
When he suggested guns with safety locks, that only unlock when a person's fingerprints match, he seemed to be advocating that manufacturers make them that way, but not that it be a law that they be made that way.
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