White House makes clear: No push for new gun laws

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama meets with mem­bers of his cab­i­net in the Cab­i­net Room of the White House in Wash­ing­ton Thurs­day. From left are Inte­rior Sec­re­tary Ken Salazar, Secre­atry of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton, the pres­i­dent and Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Pablo Mar­tinez Monsivais)

BEN FELLER

AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama will not push for stricter gun laws this elec­tion year, the White House said Thurs­day, one day after his impas­sioned remarks about the need to keep assault weapons off the streets sug­gested he may plunge into that polit­i­cal fight and chal­lenge Con­gress to act.

Instead, Obama’s stand on the government’s role ended up right where it was after the mass shoot­ing in Col­orado last week: Enforce exist­ing law better.

That is same view held by his Repub­li­can oppo­nent, Mitt Rom­ney, as both reach for broader and more polit­i­cally appeal­ing ways to keep guns away from killers.

Obama still wants Con­gress to rein­sti­tute a fed­eral ban on military-style assault weapons that lapsed years ago, his spokesman Jay Car­ney said. But the pres­i­dent is not and has not been push­ing for that ban, a nod to the pol­i­tics of gun control.

There is no inter­est among many law­mak­ers of both par­ties to take on the divi­sive mat­ter. Espe­cially not with an elec­tion in just over 100 days.

Seal­ing the mat­ter, Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid said Thurs­day the Senate’s sched­ule is too packed to even have a debate on gun control.

Asked if the Sen­ate might debate the issue next year, Reid said, “Nice try.”

Pub­lic opin­ion has shifted away from tighter gun con­trol. Twenty years ago, polls showed that a sub­stan­tial major­ity sup­ported stricter lim­its on guns. Now Amer­i­cans appear evenly divided. Nearly every state­ment on the mat­ter from Rom­ney and Obama includes reminders that they stand by the Sec­ond Amendment.

From the White House, Car­ney said: “There are things that we can do short of leg­is­la­tion and short of gun laws.”

The lack of leg­is­la­tion reflects that real­ity, too: Police say laws and back­ground checks are often futile in keep­ing some­one with hor­ri­fy­ing intent from exe­cut­ing a mas­sacre. Author­i­ties say the sus­pect in the Aurora, Colo., shoot­ings broke no laws when he pur­chased the guns he is accused of using, and he passed the required back­ground checks.

Obama and his team “gain noth­ing polit­i­cally, and they just don’t have the horse­power to pass any­thing,” said William Viz­zard, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of crim­i­nal jus­tice at Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­sity, Sacra­mento, and an author on gun con­trol pol­i­tics. “And then the prob­lem is try­ing to craft a law that would really do something.”

Yet at least one promi­nent gun con­trol group sought Thurs­day to pres­sure Obama and Rom­ney to offer vot­ers con­crete plans. The group’s pres­i­dent, Dan Gross, said words alone were not enough in a nation in which 32 peo­ple are killed by guns each day. He specif­i­cally chal­lenged Obama to move beyond the rhetoric.

“The pres­i­dent said very sim­i­lar things in his last cam­paign,” said Gross, head of the Brady Cam­paign to Pre­vent Gun Vio­lence. “A speech is not a plan. An endorse­ment of a mea­sure is not a solution.”

It was Obama who stirred the issue in speak­ing Wednes­day night to the National Urban League, a civil rights orga­ni­za­tion whose mis­sion is to help black Amer­i­cans secure eco­nomic oppor­tu­nity and power.

In his most exten­sive remarks on guns since the Col­orado shoot­ing left 12 dead and dozens wounded, Obama said steps to reduce vio­lence have been opposed by Con­gress and “we should leave no stone unturned” in the national imper­a­tive of keep­ing young peo­ple safe.

And he got spe­cific on assault-style weapons. “A lot of gun own­ers would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of sol­diers, not in the hands of crim­i­nals — that they belong on the bat­tle­field of war, not on the streets of our cities,” he said.

Obama’s mes­sage was com­pre­hen­sive, but he ulti­mately did not promise any­thing spe­cific. He spoke of com­mu­nity polic­ing strate­gies and men­tal health cen­ters, or pro­grams that steer peo­ple away into safe activ­i­ties instead of gang vio­lence, of ensur­ing that par­ents and teach­ers step in to fill a hole in a child’s heart “that gov­ern­ment alone can­not fill.”

Rom­ney, in an inter­view Thurs­day with CNN, said new laws won’t help. He cited the case of Tim­o­thy McVeigh, who was con­victed and put to death for the 1995 bomb­ing of a fed­eral build­ing in Okla­homa City, which killed 168 peo­ple. McVeigh used fer­til­izer in con­struct­ing his bomb.

“I think that the effort to con­tinue to look for some law to some­how make vio­lence go away is miss­ing the point,” Rom­ney said. “The real point has to relate to indi­vid­u­als that are deranged and dis­tressed, and to find them and help them and to keep them from car­ry­ing out ter­ri­ble acts.”

The ban on assault weapons that became law in 1994, dur­ing Pres­i­dent Bill Clinton’s first term, con­tributed to the Democ­rats’ loss of Con­gress that year. It expired dur­ing George W. Bush’s pres­i­dency in 2004.

The ban would have pre­vented the Col­orado shoot­ing sus­pect, James Holmes, from legally buy­ing one of the four firearms police found on him and in his car, an assault rifle. It also would have pre­vented him from buy­ing new high-capacity ammu­ni­tion magazines.

Viz­zard, the gun con­trol scholar, said there are leg­isla­tive ways to reduce gun vio­lence, par­tic­u­larly over a longer term of 20 to 30 years. But with an esti­mated 300 mil­lion guns in the United States, he said, Obama is right that “the things that have the most impact are cul­tural” and that shape the behav­ior of young people.

Obama once got into his own firestorm dur­ing the 2008 pres­i­den­tial race by say­ing some bit­ter small-town res­i­dents cling to guns and reli­gion for solace. This time, Viz­zard said, the pres­i­dent will not give any mate­r­ial to crit­ics who believe he is out to strip their gun rights.

“He’s a cagey guy,” Viz­zard said. “He’s just not going to do it.”

Posted by AP News on Jul 26 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.