Rachel Maddow: Hillary Clinton May Have Just Moved Obama To Act On Gun Reform

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow believes Hillary Clinton may have just shifted the national conversation around gun control.

Maddow suggested on her show Monday that Clinton's recently announced proposals on gun reform -- which call for limits on the availability and distribution of firearms and threaten the use of administrative action -- may prompt the Obama administration to act.

"What Hillary Clinton has done is fascinating, because of how it sets her up vis-a-vis the president," Maddow said. "With these new policy proposals that Hillary Clinton has just come out with, if she is right that these are all things that could be done by a president with or without Congress, well, that raises the question of whether President Obama could do these things now too."

Maddow said that if Clinton's proposals can in fact be achieved right now, it may lead to an executive branch policy win for the former secretary of state before she even landed the presidential nomination.

"If she has now identified a series of newly aggressive things a president could do alone on enforcing the gun laws in this country by rolling out that list of policies right now, Secretary Clinton may not have just changed the conversation around her own campaign, she could conceivably move American policy on this issue right now, even before she is nominated, let alone elected," Maddow said.

Maddow then asked what Clinton's ideas mean for the Obama administration if it agrees with them.

"If she's right," she said, "President Obama should tell us why he's not doing them himself."

Watch the clip here.