������Ƶ

There are two realities that perhaps even those most deeply entrenched on the opposite sides of the gun control conversation might agree on.

One, far too many Americans die from gun violence each year. In fact, Americans are 20 times more likely than individuals from other developed nations to die by gunfire.

And two, Congress has no plans now or in the foreseeable future to take any action that might deal with that fact in any way. While we might argue about why that reality exists, certainly no reasonable person would claim it doesn’t.

As recently as 2013, the U.S. Senate killed reasonable gun control legislation supported not only by . It is entirely reasonable that the President of the United States acts in our nation’s best interests.

And act he did on Tuesday morning, largely intended to keep guns out of the hands of more people who never should have them and proposing funding increases to significantly boost staffing at the and provide $500 million for more mental health care to prevent violent outbreaks and suicides.

While complete details on Obama’s initiatives are not yet available, the president provided sufficient information to see the focus and impact of each. Rightly billed by the White House as “common sense” measures, they would require, among other things, that all businesses selling guns, including gun show vendors and online businesses, be licensed and conduct complete background checks on their customers.

Through the president’s actions, the ATF is developing further rules to require background checks on those seeking to buy weapons through trusts, corporations or other entities. The FBI is beefing up the background check system with 230 more staffers to make it more effective and efficient. And Attorney General Loretta Lynch is requiring states to be complete in sharing criminal records, criminal case dispositions and names of individuals disqualified from ownership because of domestic violence incidents or mental illness.

Guns And Gun Violence In Hawaii

All in all, the executive actions aren’t expected to have a major impact on Hawaii, which has had the lowest rate of gun violence in the nation for the past two years. This is no accident: Hawaii also has some of the nation’s strongest gun violence prevention laws.

That’s not to say we have no guns: There are likely about as many people in Hawaii as there are firearms — similar to the country as a whole, where the estimate of about 310 million firearms roughly matches the U.S. population.

But our strong laws have been supplemented over the past two years with new levels of support via the National Instant Criminal Background Check System or NICS, the federal database that tracks those who are not eligible to buy firearms or explosives.

Though the federal system was launched in 1998, state participation has been slow in coming. Two years ago, Hawaii had submitted only a single record to the system, though state officials argued that it was sharing criminal record information with the FBI through other means.

Now, the is sending all required records to the NICS, including cases where individuals have been involuntarily committed to mental institutions for their own protection or the protection of others.

As of October 2015, for instance, approximately 240 such involuntary civil commitments in Hawaii were in the NICS, as were nearly 1,800 cases of Hawaii individuals acquitted of crimes by reasons of insanity, according to the center’s director, Liane Moriyama.

How big of a role do background checks play? Studies cited by U.S. Rep. Mark Takai in a news release praising Obama’s executive actions show that every day where background checks are used nationally, the NICS system stops more than 170 felons, about 50 domestic abusers and nearly 20 fugitives from legally purchasing a firearm.

That’s impact.

A Strong Case For Action

As is often the case with common sense proposals such as those revealed by the president on Tuesday, critics on both sides of the issue have complaints. On the right, those who loathe the president’s propensity to govern by executive order and detest any perceived effort to undermine 2nd Amendment rights are unhappy.

“We must not allow our leaders to act like dictators just because they are repeatedly denied a political victory,” carped U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, one of the senators who helped kill the 2013 attempt at gun control legislation.

On the left, some say the actions don’t go far enough, though all three major Democratic presidential candidates — Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley — strongly embraced them, in stark contrast to the Republican candidates who uniformly condemned them.

The case for the actions, as made by the president himself in Tuesday’s emotionally charged news conference, could not be stronger. The simple numbers behind our gun violence epidemic overwhelmingly speak for themselves:

• More than 30,000 Americans are killed with guns each year, 20,000 of them by suicide alone.
• Nearly 4 million Americans have been the victim of assaults, robberies or other crimes committed with a gun over the past decade.
• More than 20,000 Americans under the age of 18 have been killed by firearms over the past decade.

Behind every single death represented in those staggeringly large numbers, there is untold tragedy — families and communities devastated by grief, survivors left to somehow make sense of the senseless carnage and find a way to go on.

Their stories visibly weighed on the president as he spoke, recounting deaths in recent years in Columbine, Aurora, Charleston, Tuscon and others, especially Newtown, Connecticutt, where 20 first-graders and six staffers were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 by a crazed shooter who later killed himself.

“First-graders,” said the president, pausing at length to wipe away tears. “Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad.”

As it should us all.

Such senseless tragedy is more than our nation should bear. Thanks to the president’s executive actions, the path from anger and grief to a better day is now beginning to take shape.