Speaking at the White House on Thursday evening, a visibly frustrated and emotional President Obama remarked on the deadly shooting at a community college in Oregon. (AP) 
 
 Speaking at the White House on Thursday evening, a visibly frustrated and emotional President Obama remarked on the deadly shooting at a community college in Oregon. (AP) 
 
 In response to the latest mass shooting during his presidency, President Obama is seriously considering circumventing Congress with his executive authority and imposing new background-check requirements for buyers who purchase weapons from high-volume gun dealers. 
 
 Under the proposed rule change, dealers who exceed a certain number of sales each year would be required to obtain a license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and perform background checks on potential buyers. 
 
 As the president heads to Roseburg, Ore., on Friday to comfort the survivors and families of those killed in last week’s mass shooting at Umpqua Community College, the political calculus around his most vexing domestic policy issue is shifting once again. 
 
 After the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., claimed the lives of 20 students and six staff members, Obama asked Vice President Biden to devise a list of policy proposals in response, and on Jan. 26, 2013, the president announced 23 executive actions ranging from restarting federal research into the causes of gun violence to providing parity for mental health coverage under private insurance plans. He pushed for legislation mandating universal background checks on gun sales, an effort that failed in the Senate in April 2013. In August that year, Obama closed two gun-sale loopholes through executive authority, subjecting gun purchases by corporations and trusts to background checks and banning almost all re-imports of military surplus firearms to private entities. 
 
 [Guns, race remain Obama’s biggest missed opportunities] 
 
 View Graphic ‘Our lives are shattered beyond repair’: The victims of the Oregon college shooting 
 
 In the wake of last week’s tragedy, Obama said he had asked his team “to scrub what kinds of authorities do we have to enforce the laws that we have in place more effectively to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.” 
 
 “We are hopeful we can find a way to do this,” said one senior administration official, who noted that lawyers were still working through details to ensure that the rule could pass legal muster. “It’s a lot more clear today than it was a year ago how to work this out.” 
 
 Nine days before a shooter opened fire on the Umpqua Community College campus, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and her husband, Mark Kelly, were at the White House to reiterate a long-standing request that those private dealers who sell a sizable number of guns conduct background checks on buyers. The proposed rule change would clarify what it means to be “engaged in the business” of selling firearms. 
 
 In a meeting with Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, Giffords and Kelly, who became gun-control activists after Giffords was seriously wounded in a mass shooting in 2011, were pushing for a regulatory change that administration officials considered — but then shelved — nearly two years ago. 
 
 The proposed executive action aims to impose background checks on individuals who buy from dealers who sell a significant number of guns each year. The current federal statute dictates that those who are “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms need to obtain a federal license — and, therefore, conduct background checks — but exempts anyone “who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.” 
 
 White House officials drafted the proposal in late 2013 to apply to those dealers who sell at least 50 guns annually, after Congress had rejected legislation that would have expanded background checks more broadly to private sellers. While the White House Office of Legal Counsel and then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. initially concluded the regulation was legally defensible, according to several individuals involved in the discussions, some federal lawyers remained concerned that setting an arbitrary numerical threshold could leave the rule vulnerable to a challenge. 
 
 ATF officials, moreover, objected that it would be hard to enforce and that it was unclear how many sellers would be affected by the change. “Everyone realized it would be hugely politically controversial,” said one individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private discussions. 
 
 1 of 27 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × One gunman, nine victims dead: Scenes from the attack, aftermath View Photos Multiple casualties and deaths occurred after shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore Caption Multiple casualties and deaths occurred after shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. An undated photo of gunman Chris Harper Mercer from his MySpace page. Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton listed the idea of changing the definition of who qualifies as a gun dealer as one of her top proposals to address gun violence. 
 
 [Can Hillary Clinton’s background checks proposal actually work?] 
 
 The aides to Biden who worked most intently on the background-checks proposal in 2013 have since left the administration, but it has resurfaced periodically: Obama discussed the idea with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch during a July 9 Oval Office meeting, aides said, three weeks after nine African American parishioners were gunned down in Charleston, S.C. Now, according to administration officials, a group of West Wing staffers are working in concert on this and other possible executive actions. 
 
 Pia Carusone, a senior adviser at Americans for Responsible Solutions, the group Giffords and Kelly founded, declined to discuss details surrounding private White House meetings. 
 
 “Over the last few years, Gabby, Mark and ARS staff have met with various administration officials to discuss how we can work together to address America’s gun violence problem,” Carusone said by e-mail. “Many potential solutions have been discussed in conversations that have included the president, vice president and their teams.” 
 
 Arkadi Gerney, senior vice president at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, said tightening the definition of who is “engaged in the business” of selling guns “is a meaningful but modest step towards the goal of ensuring that all gun sales involve a background check.” 
 
 National Rifle Association spokeswoman Jennifer Baker, by contrast, said any change was unnecessary and could “ensnare” people not intended to be covered by the law, such as a widow selling off her late husband’s gun collection. “People who repeatedly sell large volumes of firearms are already covered in the current statute because they are already defined as ‘engaged in the business,’ ” she said. 
 
 Some activists, including those from the faith and community organizing group Metro Industrial Areas Foundation say Obama could be much bolder with his executive authority. On Thursday, the group, which is pushing the president to leverage the federal government’s purchasing power with gun manufacturers, held a rally in Lafayette Square to demand Obama call in industry leaders and insist that they develop safer technology and crack down on the stores that sell a disproportionate number of guns used in crimes. 
 
 “We have traveled here from across the nation to challenge you to stop whining about the power you don’t have, and start acting with the power you do have,” said Bishop Douglas Miles, who is on the group’s leadership team and serves as pastor of Koinonia Baptist Church in Baltimore. 
 
 Last week, Obama said that “this is something we should politicize” and that every American had “to for a while, be a single-issue voter” when it came to tightening the nation’s gun laws. 
 
 Gun-control activists have made significant political headway on the state level since the Newtown shooting. In the past year, they prevailed on background check fights in Washington state and Oregon; laws to carry concealed weapons without a permit were enacted in three states but defeated in 15. According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 55 percent of gun laws enacted so far this year loosened restrictions rather than tightened them, and many were quite minor. In 2012, by contrast, 72 percent of all enacted gun laws loosened restrictions. 
 
 “The gun lobby has done a very good job of tying up Washington, D.C.,” said John Feinblatt, president of the advocacy group Everytown. “It can’t tie up the people, and cannot, in fact, tie up state legislatures.” 
 
 While polling shows between 85 and 92 percent of Americans support expanding background checks, the broader issue of gun rights remains fraught. In Roseburg, where many have chafed at the administration’s gun policies, opinion remains sharply divided over whether Obama should even come to offer his condolences to victims’ families. 
 
 “Half the people in Roseburg say it’s wonderful, the other half say he shouldn’t show up,” said Earl Skonberg, a local gun owner who engages in sport shooting. ||||| In the wake of the Oregon shooting, it now looks as if political gunfights will be breaking out all over the presidential race. How to combat gun violence could become a real issue in the 2016 race: The Republican presidential candidates have seemed to adopt the position that there is little the federal government can do about it, and today, in an effort to contrast with that willfully defeatist posture, Hillary Clinton rolled out some concrete proposals. 
 
 Clinton’s new plan, which she will discuss on the campaign trail today, includes a raft of ideas: closing loopholes in the background check system; more aggressive action to revoke the licenses of gun dealers who knowingly supply so-called “straw purchasers”; and repealing a law that protects gun manufacturers from liability for gun violence. 
 
 But the most controversial aspect of Clinton’s plan is this: She vowed to take executive action to partly close the loophole that allows private sellers to peddle guns without a background check if Congress doesn’t. 
 
 Clinton’s campaign says that this could theoretically be accomplished via a new rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that would more clearly define what it means to be “engaged in the business” of selling firearms. Gun control advocates point out that under federal law, those “engaged in the business” of selling firearms must perform background checks, but federal regulations defining that phrase are too vague, allowing too many gun sales to proceed without such a check. Such federal regs, they say, could be changed through executive action that, for example, would set a clearer threshold defining “engaged in the business” of selling firearms in terms of the number of guns sold. 
 
 Arkadi Gerney, a gun policy expert at the Center for American Progress, tells me what Clinton’s new policy proposal means: 
 
 “One way you could do this would be to have a clear numerical threshold on the number of gun sales.” 
 
 “The statute says that anyone engaged in the business of selling firearms must apply for a federal license. Like any other statute where it’s vague, there’s the potential to define it further. You could update the regulation and have a more clear threshold. You couldn’t say, we define ‘engaged in the business’ as anyone who sells a gun ever. But you could change the regulation to be more focused, more narrow, and less vague than it currently is, which makes it very hard to prosecute people who abuse the law and are selling tens and hundreds of guns as private sellers. 
 
 But if Clinton could do this as president, couldn’t Obama do this by executive action right now? Gerney thinks the answer is Yes: 
 
 “Clinton’s idea of clarifying further what kind of gun sellers are engaging in business and need to get a license to sell guns is a smart one. She’s right that the President can do more to define the current law on what level of gun-selling activity triggers the requirement to conduct background checks. And, by putting this idea forward it is something of an implicit challenge to the current administration to move forward along these lines.” 
 
 More on this later, but this raises new questions: Is Obama, who has been visibly frustrated by government inaction, thinking of undertaking such an executive action? Will Clinton’s public vow to undertake such action raise the pressure on the administration to do the same? 
 
 Meanwhile, Clinton’s new proposal seems like an implicit challenge to Bernie Sanders, who has been criticized as insufficiently committed to gun reform. And the vow of action — including executive action — also seems designed to project an urgency that will contrast sharply with the decided lack of urgency projected by the GOP presidential candidates. But that brings us to our next item. 
 
 * ON GUNS, TRUMP’S BRASH ‘GET IT DONE ‘ SPIRIT EVAPORATES: On Meet the Press and This Week, Donald Trump was pressed on what we should do about gun violence and mass shootings. He kept repeating that mental illness was the problem and that people are going to slip through the “cracks.” And he said this on Meet about the Oregon shooting: 
 
 “You were not allowed to have guns at all in that particular area. And you could make the case that it woulda been a lot better had people had guns because they had something to fire back.” 
 
 So, is more armed security Trump’s answer? Pressed on that question, the brash, get-it-done billionaire demurred again. Deporting 11 million people is a piece of cake, but gun violence is a problem we can’t even begin to debate trying to solve. 
 
 * TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP DEAL REACHED: It’s on: 
 
 The United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations on Monday agreed to the largest regional trade accord in history, a potentially precedent-setting model for global commerce and worker standards that would tie together 40 percent of the world’s economy, from Canada and Chile to Japan and Australia. The Trans-Pacific Partnership still faces months of debate in Congress and will inject a new flash point into both parties’ presidential contests. 
 
 Look for Donald Trump to demagogue this to the hilt against his GOP rivals, who support “free trade.” How will blue collar Republicans respond? 
 
 * SANDERS-MENTUM CONTINUES DRIVING LARGE CROWDS: Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders drew a crowd of 20,000 in Boston, doubling the 10,000 showing that Barack Obama drew in Massachusetts in 2008. What’s interesting here is that Massachusetts holds its primary voting on March 1st, so this hints at the possibility that Sanders may be able to post good showings after the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. 
 
 What still remains to be seen is whether Sanders can really compete with Hillary Clinton in states outside the northeast where the electorate is far more diverse, giving her a real advantage. 
 
 * BIDEN IS LEANING TOWARDS RUNNING, REPORT CLAIMS: CBS News reported over the weekend: 
 
 Vice President Joe Biden is nearing a decision on whether to run for president, and it could come as early as within the next seven to 10 days, according to three people familiar with his deliberations. Two of those people said he is leaning toward entering the race. 
 
 We’ll see about this. Even if Biden does announce within seven to 10 days, mid-October seems awfully late to launch, given the need to ramp up organizing and fundraising. 
 
 * HOW OBAMA CAN FIGHT GUN VIOLENCE ON HIS OWN: A leading gun control group will release a report today that documents other executive actions that President Obama can take right now to try to prevent guns from falling into the hands of dangerous people. Among the ideas: making it clear to law enforcement agencies that prohibitions of gun sales to those convicted of domestic abuse also applies to those who are unmarried; and stepping up efforts to get federal agencies to notify state agencies of people who fail background checks. 
 
 While such steps appear modest, Obama declared after the Oregon shooting that he has directed his staff to determine what actions are available to him, so he may take whatever ideas he can get. 
 
 * CALLING OUT CONSERVATIVES ON GUN VIOLENCE: E.J. Dionne says that we damn well should be politicizing gun violence: 
 
 Politicizing this struggle means being unrelentingly candid in calling out an American conservative movement that proudly champions law and order but allows itself to be dominated by gun extremists who deride every gun measure that might make our country a little bit safer — no matter how many mass killings we have. Conservatives all over the world are aghast at our nation’s permissive attitude toward guns. Is a dangerous and harebrained absolutism about weaponry really the issue on which American conservatives want to practice exceptionalism? 
 
 Well, yes, they do, though they would probably not define their stance as “dangerous and harebrained absolution,” since many of them actually believe more guns are really the answer. 
 
 * AND VOTERS LIKE HILLARY, BUT DON’T LOVE HER: The Associated Press talked to more than 70 Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, and found that many support her candidacy but still harbor doubts about her, either on specific issues or more generally. Note: 
 
 “She certainly could manage the country,” said Jim Gallagher, a 61-year-old, real estate investor from Manchester. “But she just rubs me the wrong way. But, hey, you don’t have to like her, right?” 
 
 I’d be very interested to know whether this is a widespread sentiment: She may not be all that likable, but she has the attributes necessary to run the country, and you don’t have to like her, anyway.
– President Obama's next executive action may be to expand background checks for some gun buyers—based on whom they're buying from. Obama, who reacted with emotion to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College and will visit Roseburg, Ore., on Friday, is "seriously considering" new rules that would force private high-volume dealers to perform background checks on potential buyers, according to the Washington Post. Private dealers who sell a certain number of guns each year would also need to get a license. Nine days before the Umpqua shooting, gun-control activists Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, visited the White House to repeat their desire to see just such a rule put in place. Officials considered targeting dealers who sell at least 50 guns a year back in 2013, but the plan was ultimately put on ice. The proposed rule change would clarify the federal statute, which notes anyone "engaged in the business" of dealing firearms needs to obtain a federal license and conduct background checks, except anyone "who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms." Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton said she would take executive action to change the definition of a gun dealer if elected president, per the Post. A rep for the NRA, however, says the proposed change would "ensnare" a widow selling off her late husband's gun collection, for example. "People who repeatedly sell large volumes of firearms are already covered in the current statute," she says.