Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
President Obama has directed his team to complete a proposal aimed at expanding background checks on gun buyers without the approval of Congress. Obama is seeking to “finalize a set of recommendations on what more the administration can do on its own to save lives from gun violence, and those recommendations will include making sure we do everything we can to keep guns out of the wrong hands, including those expanded background checks,” White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said at a national gun-violence vigil in Washington, D.C. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday that the review Jarrett referred to has been going on for “a couple of months,” adding that there was now renewed appetite for an overhaul of the rules in the wake of recent mass shootings.