This week President Obama defended his record of most pardons/commutations of any president in the modern era by issuing 231 pardons and commutations. Forty-nine of these offenders were convicted on charges of felony use or possession of firearms:
President Obama pardoned 78 people and shortened the sentences of 153 others convicted of federal crimes Monday, the most individual clemencies ever granted by a president in a single day
Forty-nine of the individuals had been convicted of firearms offenses.
[…]
The actions bring the total number of commutations by Mr. Obama to 1,176 people, including 395 who were serving life sentences, said White House counsel Neil Eggleston. The president has now pardoned a total of 148 people during his presidency.
Obama has pardoned or commuted the sentences of 107 felons convicted of gun crimes during his presidency. What's more:
Mr. Obama has set modern records for clemency, reducing or canceling sentences for more than 600 federal inmates, more than his nine predecessors going back to John F. Kennedy combined. Thousands of other petitions are pending, and the White House has promised to continue on its path.
Violent offenders have a 71% recidivism rate; drug offenders, 77%.
Further complicating matters, the rhetoric used by the gun-control lobby to restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners is entirely fabricated. For instance, Chicago is overrun, not because of Indiana, but because judges don't punish criminals for violating the law:
From January 2006 through August 2013, thousands of cases involving a weapons violation were thrown out in Cook County’s criminal courts, The Chicago Reporter found. More than 13,000 cases that included a gun violation have been dismissed during that period, shows the Reporter’s analysis of records maintained by the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County. In fact, more felony cases involving a gun–from illegal possession to unlawful sale to a felon–have been thrown out than cases with any other type of charge.
[…]
The number of dismissed felony gun-related cases has grown from 845 in 2006 to 2,109 in 2012, the Reporter analysis shows. The trend has continued during the first seven months of this year, during which more gun cases were thrown out than in either 2006 or 2007.
[…]
Vilcica said her own research found that dismissals reached 75 percent among simple gun possession cases in Philadelphia in 2005 and 2006, and it sent a message to defendants that they could carry guns with impunity. “They’ll think, ‘I got through this, and nothing happened to me,’ ” she said. Her research also found that those same defendants were almost four times more likely to be convicted of an additional crime than defendants charged in other crimes.
In fact, the three cities which lag last in prosecuting gun crimes are cities run by mayors from anti-gun funder Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns group, an offshoot of Everytown. They've talked a good game about reducing crime, but can't seem to bring themselves to push for stricter sentencing for those who do actually commit crimes with illegal use of firearms.
Interestingly enough, the Bloomberg-funded anti-gun groups Everytown, Moms Demand, MAIG, and the Brady group have been silent on the President's record pardoning and commutations of illegal use gun crime offenders.
