GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum reacted to President Obama’s executive action on gun-sales background checks yesterday by saying that the president should instead use his role as “an African-American male from a big city” to address the “breakdown of the family” and oppose abortion rights.

“The president was in a unique position as a president of the United States, an African-American male from a big city, where this problem is the most acute,” Santorum told Newsmax TV’s Steve Malzberg, “and he’s done virtually nothing about it except focus on the object that is used in the commission of the crime instead of the fundamental underpinnings of why these crimes are being committed because of this breakdown of society caused by the breakdown of the family.”

Santorum also implied that the president was hypocritical for caring about gun deaths when he voted in the Illinois legislature against the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act,” an unnecessary anti-choice messaging bill that he was concerned would undermine Roe v. Wade . The former Pennsylvania senator falsely claimed that this vote means that Obama “was for killing children after they were born if the mother wanted that child to be killed.”

“So the idea that this president is out there talking in very passionate terms, and, I think, compelling and sincere terms, about innocent lives lost and has advocated for the taking of innocent lives through abortion and even infanticide,” he said, “and then sat on the sidelines as a person who could probably do more to solve the problems of the inner cities as an African-American president and done nothing with respect to the helping and improving of the family, I just think that it’s, again, the problem with liberalism is that it looks for simple solutions that have good soundbites instead of looking at the fundamental problems that are a little more complex and difficult to deal with.”

Santorum’s fellow Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made a similar statement in a Facebook post today, asking Obama why he is promoting gun background checks rather than granting “personhood” rights to fertilized eggs and fetuses.