WASHINGTON — In the aftermath of Friday's mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, gun control advocates sent President Obama a clear message: It's time to step up.
So far, the president has offered an emotional response to the tragedy, noting his own anguish as a parent in dealing with the crisis while vowing that the country needs to respond with "meaningful action" to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. He echoed those sentiments Saturday morning in his weekly radio address, but neither he nor White House aides have laid out what steps they may take.
Some high-profile proponents of stricter gun restrictions have already suggested that Obama — who as a state lawmaker in Illinois and a U.S. senator counted himself as a strong gun control advocate — must do more to elevate gun control to a front-burner issue as he begins his second term.
"Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. "We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before."
Congress has not approved a major new gun law since 1994, and lawmakers let the assault-weapons ban, enacted under President Clinton, expire in 2004.
It's an issue that has received scant attention from the president or Congress despite a series of mass shootings, including one at a movie theater in Colorado and another a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, just months before the election.
After a gunman killed 12 people and wounded 58 others in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater incident in July, Obama said it was time for the country to have a serious conversation on reducing gun violence.
But on the campaign trail, Obama offered little substantively on how he planned to take on the issue, beyond suggesting during one of the debates that he would support a re-enactment of the assault-weapons ban.
"So my belief is that … we have to enforce the laws we've already got, make sure that we're keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill," Obama said at the Oct. 16 debate. "We've done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we've got more to do when it comes to enforcement."
Obama's apparent reluctance to take on gun laws in a meaningful way in the midst of an election season, in part, may have been a reflection of just how deeply divided Americans remain about the issue. Fifty percent said they favored no restrictions or only minor restrictions on owning guns, and 48% supported major restrictions or a complete ban on gun ownership by individuals except police and other authorized personnel, according to a CNN/ORC poll published in August in the aftermath of the Colorado and Wisconsin shootings.
The gun lobby is one of the best-funded and most powerful forces in American politics. Gun-rights groups have remained largely silent since Friday's shooting, but National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre, in a Dec. 3 interview with conservative Glenn Beck, criticized how mass shooting tragedies are used by gun control advocates to bolster their calls for tougher laws.
"We've seen it a thousand times over and over and over," LaPierre said. "The media seizes on the back of this national tragedy to try to piggyback their anti-Second Amendment national agenda right on top of the back of the national tragedy and try to force it on Americans all over the country," he said.
In an interview prior to Friday's shooting, Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said major incidents of gun violence have not necessarily helped the argument for increased gun control.
"The reaction has framed the argument for what it is against, not what it is for,'' Gross said. "They are important moments (mass shootings); they are not enough on their own.''
Since he emerged on the national political scene more than eight years ago, Obama has framed himself as moderate on the issue
— espousing his firm belief in Americans' constitutional rights to bear arms while backing "common sense" fixes to existing gun laws.
And while the president didn't press gun control during his first term, he's hardly dispassionate about the issue.
As a young state senator representing a district on Chicago's South Side, where gun violence was a scourge in many of his constituents' neighborhoods, Obama was out-in-front in his support for tougher gun laws.
He supported increasing penalties for the illegal interstate transportation of firearms and backed tougher penalties for gun owners who failed to properly secure weapons that were stolen and used in a crime. He also backed restricting gun purchases to one weapon per month.
Even before Friday's incident, Obama was destined to face more pressure from gun control advocates.
Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign, said the campaign had planned to launch an effort before President Obama's inauguration that would include public service announcements featuring survivors of past mass shooting events to begin a new "conversation'' about the volatile issue.
"We believe he (Obama) has to stand up to this issue,'' Gross said. "It's too big an issue to ignore in the second term.''
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