WASHINGTON -- The centerpiece of a plan for stemming gun violence that President Barack Obama announced last month largely amounts to an updated Web page and 10,000 pamphlets that federal agents will give out at gun shows.
Obama ordered steps intended to limit gun violence and vowed to clamp down on what he called widespread evasion of a federal law requiring gun dealers to obtain licenses.
But few concrete actions have been put in motion by law enforcement agencies to aggressively carry out the gun dealer initiative, despite the lofty expectations that Obama and top aides set.
Obama administration officials said they have no specific plans to increase investigations, arrests or prosecutions of gun sellers who do not comply with the law. No task forces have been assembled. No agents or prosecutors have been specifically reassigned to such cases. And no funding has been reallocated to accelerate gun-sale investigations in Washington or at the offices of the 93 U.S. attorneys.
The absence of aggressive enforcement is a reminder of the limits of Obama's executive authority, even as he repeatedly asserts the power of the Oval Office to get things done in the face of inaction by a Republican Congress.
Even the National Rifle Association, which fights anything it perceives as a threat to gun rights, has not sued to block Obama's actions, and pro-gun groups profess little reason for concern.
"Nothing from what we can see has changed," said Mike Bazinet, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group.
Administration officials say that with Congress unwilling to take any legislative action, the White House's plan goes as far as Obama can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and people with mental illness.
"The actions the president announced last month represent the maximum the administration can do under the current law," said Eric Schultz, deputy White House press secretary, "namely increasing mental health treatment and reporting, improving public safety, managing the future of gun safety technology and. of course, enhancing the background check system."
For Obama, the announcement of new gun measures gave him the chance to demonstrate what he called the "fierce urgency" to respond to mass shootings. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters on the day Obama announced the plan that the government was "ramping up our enforcement efforts, particularly online" and "will be looking" for unlicensed gun dealers.
But turning political promises into real action is often difficult in the final year of a presidency. The president's attempts to sidestep lawmakers on immigration have been tied in courts for more than a year, and he faces fights on executive orders to expand gay rights, establish a minimum wage for federal contractors and combat climate change.
The most visible sign of the president's initiative to license more gun dealers is the printing of 10,000 pamphlets clarifying what qualifies a gun seller as a dealer. Officials plan to hand out the pamphlets at gun shows, weekend flea markets and elsewhere. They say they hope the "education campaign," as it is called, will prompt more gun sellers to register as dealers, who then must conduct background checks. The same information has been updated on the website of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The new guidance says there is no "bright line" for determining whether someone should register as a dealer, but that a number of factors -- such as selling even a small number of new firearms in their original packaging, making a profit and selling regularly at gun shows or online -- could qualify.
Sally Quillian Yates, deputy attorney general, said the ATF's new guidance would put people who sell guns regularly "on notice" that they must register as dealers and conduct background checks. She said it should also eventually lead to more successful prosecutions of unregistered gun dealers who are flouting the law.
But gun control advocates say they want more than just notification. Jonas Oransky, chief counsel at Everytown for Gun Safety, said the ATF should not expect that arrests and prosecutions will happen "without extra energy behind it by them," but added, "We're giving them some time to figure out how best to do this."
White House officials said it was too early to judge the effect of the president's measures. And they said the effort to register more gun dealers was just one piece of the larger set of measures the president unveiled at the White House last month. Other elements of the gun initiative would tighten rules on gun purchases by corporations and more quickly identify lost or stolen guns.
The president also sought to improve the FBI's ability to identify prohibited gun buyers by hiring more background check examiners and by collecting more criminal and mental health information from states.
A Section on 02/08/2016