The package, which Obama plans to announce Tuesday, includes 10 separate provisions, White House officials said. One key provision would require more gun sellers -- especially those who do business on the Internet and at gun shows -- to be licensed and would force them to conduct background checks on potential buyers. Obama would devote $500 million more in federal funds to treating mental illness -- a move that could require congressional approval -- and require that firearms lost in transit between a manufacturer and a seller be reported to federal authorities.

No one has the same number, but they are all in the same range, just short of one a day for 3 years straight.  Also, by definition family shootings are mass shootings, but I feel like those, and other shootings in which the victims are familiar are not the same as the random killing mass shooters.

It's all academic as I think almost everyone agree there are too many, where we differ is in reducing them.  One side says more, the other says less.

Any actual rights to privacy are signed away every time you transit the health care system.

To me it appears that the rule allows someone to be checkmarked "crazy" in the database, with no background but their name and whatever other data is required to pin them in the pigeonhole.  

For decades, restraints, inadequate funding, impotent leadership and a lack of political constituency have stymied the agency from carrying out its core mission. Two years ago, a review by the Government Accountability Office found the agency lacked the resources needed to adequately track the outcomes of thousands of investigations involving improperly purchased firearms despite such cases being a "top priority".

The same report identified serious personnel concerns, noting that ATF's staffing was at its lowest level in nearly a decade, the result of a four-year hiring freeze and stagnant funding that "did not keep pace with the cost of employee salaries and benefits".

ATF currently has 624 industry operations investigators in the field, who are tasked with conducting compliance inspections of more than 140,000 federally licensed firearms dealers in the US, the agency said. In broadening the definition of who should be classified as a gun dealer, Obama's plan would likely add many thousands more to that total.

He can make as many executive orders as he wants, but until we have the people and resources to carry them out, it's doesn't matter.

The ATF is charged with regulating America's multibillion-dollar gun industry. But many say it is the industry that dominates the agency.

"If you can strangle the chief agency charged with carrying out gun laws, it's the equivalent of not having those laws in place," said Robert Spitzer, author of The Politics of Gun Control and a political science professor at the State University of New York. "It's a backdoor way to reduce gun regulations."

Critics of the ATF, in particular the nation's largest gun organization, the National Rifle Association, have successfully lobbied for laws and regulations that have effectively "crippled" the agency, Spitzer said.

Spitzer pointed to the series of "riders" attached to annual appropriations legislation at the behest of the gun lobby, he said, that have effectively hobbled the agency from completing even core functions of its mission.

One rider, for example, restricts the ATF from consolidating and computerizing its data in a modern manner. Another imposes prohibitions on its ability to regulate and oversee firearms dealers.

"ATF is the `whipping boy' of the gun community," Spitzer said. "And that's how it's been for decades."