I see that the governor of New Mexico passed, or tried to pass, a kind of unilateral emergency law in response to some recent gun violence in her state.
You don't have to be an expert in US law to guess that that ran into a few issues straight off. Numerous lawsuits and calls for impeachment and a judge granted, I dunno, I don't think it's called a stay, but a thing that blocks it being implemented while they argue about it. Also a lot of police and the DA etc refused to implement it so it seems it really is dead in the water.
Part of me thinks that the way to resolve such a emotive and divisive issue is not by unilaterally making a decree of a kind that would be controversial whatever it dealt with... then again, maybe it is a kind of Gordian Knot that can't be untangled, only cut through. But if that is the case I feel it has to come from higher than a state governor - so I suppose I'm saying it would need to be from the president.
Question for our American buddies, what would happen if the president issued an executive order in favour of gun control? I'm being quite vague here as regards the details cos I'm asking mainly about the POTUS's ability to pass executive orders and what recourse his enemies have to block it.
Suppose a president said "The country as a whole is in favour of gun control, however the peculiarities of our system combined with history has allowed a number of wealthy vested interests to thwart the will of the majority and keep this law off the books. So I'm passing an executive order to make it harder to buy, own, display, use etc guns".
Could POTUS do that? If not, why not? If so, why don't they? If they did what could/would NRA do?