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The eight years during which Barack Obama served as president were a boom time for the gun industry. Obamas consistent and futile efforts to introduce new regulations restricting gun sales were whipped into rhetoric about imminent crackdowns on gun ownership rhetoric that predated Obamas election, much less his policy efforts.

Theres been some indication that gun sales have receded in the wake of Donald Trumps election. The go-to metric for gun sales a figure that isnt directly compiled by the government is the number of federal background checks completed during a month. The biggest month for such checks tends to be December, as people buy firearms as Christmas gifts. In December 2015, the FBI conducted 3.3 million background checks. In December 2016, after Trumps win? 2.8 million.

Over the first two months of the year, the number of checks completed totaled 4.3 million. In January and February 2016, the total was 5.2 million. Thats a 2017 decline of 17 percent but it was also the third-highest January-February total on record. (The FBI started conducting background checks in 1998.)

(The second-highest January-February period came in 2013, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre and Obamas most robust push for new regulations.)

Put another way, the total number of checks in the first two months of this year was larger than the total in 2014 and 2015 and at least 50 percent greater than every year before 2012.

Background checks are an imprecise measure, though, including things such as background checks for those seeking a concealed-carry permit. In Kentucky, for example, those with such permits undergo monthly background checks, driving up the national number.

A more precise estimate comes from excise tax data collected by the government and analyzed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Each time a gun or ammunition is sold, the Firearms and Ammunition Excise Tax (FAET) is applied, allowing the NSSF to then estimate sales figures for handguns, long guns and ammunition.

Even before Obama took office, sales figures were increasing, as the background check data make clear. But the increase from 2012 on was sustained. In 2011, Americans spent about $4.3 billion on firearms and ammunition, according to FAET data. In 2012, when gun sales spiked after Sandy Hook, the total topped $6 billion. In 2013, the total was more than $8 billion.

The end result is that total sales of guns and ammunition during Obamas eight years in office were over $45.7 billion dollars and thats without data for the fourth quarter of 2016. Thats $29.1 billion on firearms $14.7 billion of which was long guns and $16.6 billion on ammunition. When fourth-quarter numbers come in, those figures will climb.

Converted into 2016 dollars, its clear how much more was spent on firearms and ammunition under Obama than his predecessors.

During the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Americans spent an estimated $21.1 billion and $22.9 billion in 2016 dollars on guns and ammunition, respectively. Under Obama, Americans spent more than that total combined.

Its too early for us to figure out the extent to which having Trump in office will affect that number. (The National Rifle Associations Wayne LaPierre hasnt exactlysoftened his tone, post-inauguration.) Trump would be hard-pressed to be the same boon to the gun industry that Obama was no doubt to his chagrin.

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Americans spent an estimated $17 billion on ammunition while Obama was president - Washington Post

The entertainment industry gives the go-ahead to a lot of frustrating projects, but rarely has my head descended to my desk as rapidly as when I learned that in addition to the two Barack Obama biopics that were released before he left office, were now going to get a workplace comedy set in the Obama White House. Its not merely that the rush to make Obama, or even Obama-adjacent, projects reinforces the perception that the entertainment industry is in thrall to the 44th president. Instead, its that so far, stories about Obama or his administration have lacked the requisite distance to be anywhere close to decentas movies.

The chaos and unhappiness of the Trump administration to date may make it irresistible for Hollywood to cash in with Obama projects. But for the sake of the industrys remaining intellectual credibility, and for the quality of the storytelling involved, Hollywood should impose a voluntary Barack Obama moratorium until 2027, if not longer.

The two loosely biographical projects about Obama that have already been released both list under a sense of their own historical importance.

Southside With You, Richard Tannes dreadful 2016 attempt to turn Obamas (Parker Sawyers) first date with Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) into a romantic comedy, had problems beyond politics. Sawyers and Sumpter had no chemistry, and in the movie, Obamas persistence especially in pressuring Robinson to reveal to the partners at her law firm that they are dating came across as creepy rather than charming.

But the movie was particularly burdened by its need to show Robinson falling not just for Obama, but also for his vocation. The scenes of him speaking at a predominantly African American church, where the women in the congregation go on at great length about what a catch he is, were just exhausting.Any movie with a character named Barack Obama is going to make the audience compare that fictional person to the actualpresident. Southside With You needed to wrap up Obamas entire life in a tidy package, presenting his ascent and marriage as part of a neat, predetermined trajectory, rather than giving him space to breathe as either a character or a historical figure.

Vikram Gandhis Barry, which arrived on Netflix last year, is a better, looser movie. Gandhi cares less about making sure thatDevon Terrell, who plays Obama as a 1981 transfer student to Columbia, does a note-perfect impersonation of Obama, and more about showing him wandering around New York, buying books from street stands, arguing with Black Hebrew Israelites and laughing at Ed Koch.

The dramatic arc of Barry is its title characters exploration of his identity, with his relationship with fellow Columbia undergrad Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy)and the silence of his father, who dies in the movies third act, as the primary drivers of that quest. If this were a story about an otherwise anonymous college student, Barry might float along just fine, though even by that measure, the scene of Barry and Charlottes breakup at her sisters wedding, scored to I Shall Be Released, would be a travesty. But its not and hes not, so every debate he has in class about moral authority and governance, every argument he has with Charlotte about the fried chicken at Sylvias, and every time his mother (Ashley Judd) refers to her feminism lands like a heavy punctuation mark.

A movie about the fight to improve the New York subway system, or the movement to get universities to divest from South Africa both causes that engaged Obama during his college years with Obama as the main character might have found a way out from under the inevitable weight of who Obama became. But neither of those movies would have gotten greenlighted quite so quickly, nor snapped up so aggressively.

Maybe this new project, From the Corner of the Oval, based on a forthcoming memoir byBeck Dorey-Stein, who worked as a stenographer in the Obama White House, will shift the framework enough to avoid the trap that Southside With You and Barry fell into. The main character apparently stumbles into an elite world and finds herself navigating a series of misadventures in life and love, rather than the president himself. But treating the Obama administration as an opportunity for self-actualization is just another step in the forging of a nouveau-Camelot myth for another generationdefined in part by a youthful president. If Hollywood is going to participate in that process, it should at least take the time and distance to make sure the mythmaking is also good moviemaking.

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Hollywood needs a 10-year moratorium on stories about Barack Obama - Washington Post

North Korea has a criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump he probably wasn't expecting: He's too much like Barack Obama.

North Korea's state media, which regularly vilified Obama in the strongest terms, had been slow to do the same with the Trump administration, possibly so that officials in Pyongyang could figure out what direction Trump will likely take and what new policies he may pursue.

But his top diplomat's recent trip to Asia, which featured some pretty tough talk, appears to have loosened their lips.

In North Korea's first official comments since new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's swing through the region, a Foreign Ministry spokesman seized on the former oil executive's blunt assessment that Obama's strategy needs to be replaced and U.S. efforts to get North Korea to denuclearize over the past 20 years have been a failure.

The spokesman then slammed Trump for adopting the same policies, particularly regarding tougher economic sanctions, nevertheless.

"Tillerson admitted the failure of the U.S. efforts to denuclearize the DPRK for 20 years and end of Obama's policy of 'strategic patience' during his recent tour," the North's official Korean Central News Agency said in the dispatch that ran late Monday, quoting the unnamed Foreign Ministry official. "Now Tillerson is repeating what Obama touted ... until he left the White House."

North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK, hasn't exactly been sitting quietly by as Trump gets settled in.

Just before Tillerson arrived in Tokyo, the North launched several ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan. While he was still in China, it conducted a test of what it called a "revolutionary" new type of engine for its rockets. On Wednesday, it appears to have conducted more missile tests from the eastern port city of Wonsan, though they reportedly failed.

To be fair, Trump doesn't really have a North Korea policy yet.

Tillerson stressed repeatedly that a comprehensive policy review is underway and that the purpose of his trip to Asia was to hear out the North's neighbors. How much he was able to do that is questionable. South Korea has only an interim government these days, since its president was just forced out of office because of a scandal. China, North Korea's economic lifeline, has a longstanding dialogue-based agenda that Washington is already familiar with but has never shown much interest in.

On the other hand, Tillerson did raise some eyebrows with a few tough-sounding warnings.

While in Seoul, he said "everything was on the table," including military intervention or even a pre-emptive strike if tougher sanctions or other diplomatic measures fail to achieve Washington's goals.

Some policy experts in the U.S. say that is really more smoke than fire.

"If you look at Tillerson's full statements, they were much more of a continuation of current policy than has been portrayed in the press, with an emphasis on expanding sanctions," said David Wright, co-director and senior scientist of the Global Security Program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "You can try to squeeze North Korea with more sanctions and maybe slow its program, but it's hard to see how to stop it from moving ahead without diplomacy."

Tillerson's remarks are completely in line with longstanding U.S. policy, including Obama's, but just stated more threateningly. President Bill Clinton, for example, is known to have seriously considered a pre-emptive strike over the nuclear issue in 1994.

Even so, tone is important in diplomacy and Tillerson does seem to have reassured some in Seoul and Tokyo that the United States hasn't forgotten them.

Pyongyang, however, seems to have hit the familiar bravado button.

"The nuclear force of the DPRK is the treasured sword of justice and the most reliable war deterrence to defend the socialist motherland and the life of its people," the official reportedly said. "If the businessmen-turned-U.S. authorities thought that they would frighten the DPRK, they would soon know that their method would not work."

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Take that! Pyongyang lambastes Trump as too much like Obama - CNBC

The Senate voted on Wednesday to roll back an Obama-era safety regulation.

Senators voted 50-48 to nix the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule extending the amount of time a company can be penalized for failing to report workplace injuries and illnesses to five years.

Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to take a hammer to rules instituted under the Obama White House. The law allows them to overturn recently published regulations with a simple majority.

Republicans argue that the Labor Department's rule is another example of the Obama administration overstepping its boundaries.

He added thatthe move to repeal the law will let companies focus "on actual safety of employees or on more bureaucratic paper pushing."

But Democrats counter that Republicans are putting special interests above worker safety.

"The pattern that is emerging is pretty clear. Republicans have no plans to improve the lives of American workers. Quite the opposite. Republicans are increasing the odds that workers will be injured or even killed," she added.

The rest is here:
Senate nixes Obama-era workplace safety rule - The Hill (blog)

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a thoughtful assessment of what President Donald Trumps approach to combating terrorism looks like. The bottom line: It looks a lot like President Barack Obamas. It is heavy on the use of special operations raids and American airpower, but it relies primarily on indigenous forces to provide the bulk of the ground forces.

To be sure, it is not a carbon copy. It is more open to risk authorizing more missions than Obama might have, and delegating more decision-making to his subordinate military commanders. But compared to the major alternatives a large conventional invasion, unrestricted airstrikes, a hands-off approach, or something else it is more like Obamas 2016 policy than not.

Lets be clear, Obamas 2016 policy was itself a repudiation of Obamas own earlier approach. From late 2011 until late 2014, Obama tried very hard to implement a different kind of global war on terror (GWOT), one much more in keeping with his preferred strategy of off-shore balancing. During this period, Obama emphasized withdrawing U.S. ground forces altogether and relying to an extraordinary extent on local forces to do all the heavy lifting. He also relied quite extensively on drone strikes for any kinetic action.

This phase of Obamas GWOT was optimized to avoid mistakes of commission at the price of accepting more mistakes of omission. Obama judged the risks to be acceptable during this phase because he argued that core al Qaeda was on the run, that the most lethal affiliates (like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) could be handled primarily by local forces, and that other emerging terrorist groups like the Islamic State could be discounted because they were only junior varsity threats.

This was Obamas off-shore balancing phase, and he was not the first American leader to find off-shore balancing a tempting policy. But, as Hal Brands (a new Shadow Government denizen and my erstwhile Duke colleague) and I have shown elsewhere, the off-shore balancing approach failed him as it failed earlier leaders.

It failed so badly that at least some advocates of the policy have tried in vain to argue that Obamas approach should not be called off-shore balancing. I found that line of defense curious and so at a recent professional conference I asked the leading proponent of off-shore balancing, Christopher Layne, to adjudicate. He confirmed that Obamas approach to the Syria-Iraq-Islamic State problem during the 2011-2014 phase was, indeed, off-shore balancing. If it walks and quacks like an off-shore duck, it is an off-shore duck, even if it is something of a duck that has trouble staying afloat.

Once the rise of the Islamic State constituted threat powerful enough to destabilize the local balance of power a destabilization too calamitous to ignore Obama authorized the gradual shift to an on-shore approach. Initially, Obama tried to keep the shift as light-footprint as possible to the point of straining credulity, as when the Obama administration pretended the deployment of troops did not constitute boots on the ground. But over time, Obama gradually lifted arbitrary caps on numbers of deployed U.S. troops and gradually allowed for more permissive rules of engagement.

This new approach, call it a medium footprint approach, began to show results. By the end of his tenure, the president could boast with some accuracy that the United States was finally on a path to eventual success against the Islamic State. Obama and his partisan backers were considerably less candid about how their earlier approaches had failed in ways that might have contributed to the problem, but they were right to claim that they had finally found the best-of-the-alternatives approach to hand off to their successor.

Despite his scathing anti-Obama critique during the campaign, Trump seems to have agreed, since he has only modified that approach somewhat. He has stepped up efforts in keeping with his own campaign rhetoric about being bolder in the fight against the Islamic State but not in a way that would fundamentally alter the medium-footprint approach.

This leaves the question of what Trump will do if and when the Islamic State, in its current form, is finally defeated. Hal Brands and I tackle exactly that question in a new piece over at Foreign Affairs. (The directors cut version, lovingly rescued from the editors chopping block, is here. Hal writes his own Shadow summary here.)

We argue that the defeat of the so-called caliphate will be an important milestone in the GWOT, but it will not, in fact, end the terrorist threat once and for all. Some form of the threat will remain and U.S. policymakers will have to decide how to confront it.

We assess that Trumps options will look a lot like the range of options Obama and Bush considered before him: a) military disengagement, i.e. a shift back to the off-shore balancing approach Obama tried for in late 2011-late 2014; b) light-footprint counterterrorism, i.e. what Obama opted for in late 2014; c) medium-footprint counterterrorism, i.e. the direction in which Obamas approach was evolving in late 2016 and which Trump has so far extended; or d) a GWOT surge, the maximum approach the Bush administration opted for in 2007.

Each of these policies is tailored to a different understanding of the nature of the terrorist threat, and each has a different set of risks and rewards. In our judgment, none is ideal, but the least-worst is the medium-footprint approach. Assuming the Trump team does the same kind of analysis we do, we therefore expect the future of U.S. counterterrorism policy to look more like the recent past than either Obama or Trump might have promised during the presidential campaign.

Photo credit:JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

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Trump's War on Terror Rejects Obama's Off-Shore Balancing for Obama's Operational Raiding - Foreign Policy (blog)