Police push for background checks on gun purchases

NEDRA PICKLER

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Law enforce­ment lead­ers who met with Pres­i­dent Barack Obama Mon­day urged him to focus on strength­en­ing gun pur­chase back­ground checks and men­tal health sys­tems, but did not unify behind his more con­tro­ver­sial gun con­trol efforts.

The mes­sage from sher­iffs and police chiefs gath­ered at the White House reflected the polit­i­cal real­ity in Con­gress that the assault weapons ban in par­tic­u­lar is likely to have a hard time win­ning broad sup­port. The pres­i­dent appeared to rec­og­nize the chal­lenge of get­ting every­thing he wants from Con­gress as well, par­tic­i­pants in the meet­ing said.

“We’re very sup­port­ive of the assault weapons ban,” as police chiefs, said Mont­gomery County, Md., Police Chief J. Thomas Manger in an inter­view with The Asso­ci­ated Press. “But I think every­body under­stands that may be a real tough bat­tle to win. And one of the things that the pres­i­dent did say is that we can’t look at it like we have to get all of these things or we haven’t won.”

Opin­ions over an assault weapons ban and lim­its on high capac­ity mag­a­zines — two mea­sures the pres­i­dent sup­ports — were divided in the room. While Manger said the police chiefs from the large cities sup­port that kind of gun con­trol, some of the elected sher­iffs who were in the meet­ing may not.

“I think what was made clear was that gun con­trol in itself is not the sal­va­tion to this issue,” said Sher­iff Paul Fitzger­ald of Story County, Iowa, one of 13 law enforce­ment lead­ers who met with the pres­i­dent, vice pres­i­dent and Cab­i­net mem­bers for more than an hour, seated around a con­fer­ence table in the Roo­sevelt Room.

Among the par­tic­i­pants included three chiefs that responded to the worst shoot­ings of 2012, includ­ing Aurora, Colo., where 12 were killed in July; Oak Creek, Wis., where six died in an assault on a Sikh tem­ple, and New­town, Conn., scene of the most recent mass tragedy that left 20 first-graders dead.

The White House rec­og­nizes that police are a cred­i­ble and impor­tant voice in the debate over guns that has devel­oped fol­low­ing last month’s ele­men­tary school shoot­ing in Con­necti­cut. Obama opened the meet­ing before media cam­eras and declared no group more impor­tant to lis­ten to in the debate.

“Hope­fully if law enforce­ment offi­cials who are deal­ing with this stuff every sin­gle day can come to some basic con­sen­sus in terms of steps that we need to take, Con­gress is going to be pay­ing atten­tion to them, and we’ll be able to make progress,” Obama said.

Obama urged Con­gress to pass an assault weapons ban, limit high capac­ity mag­a­zines and require uni­ver­sal back­ground checks for would-be gun own­ers in a brief state­ment to the reporters. But par­tic­i­pants said after the media was escorted from the room, the focus was not on the assault weapons ban.

“He did not ask us if we do or do not sup­port an assault weapons ban,” said Hen­nepin County, Minn., Sher­iff Richard Stanek, pres­i­dent of the Major County Sher­iffs’ Asso­ci­a­tion. “He did not ask us if we do or do not sup­port high capac­ity magazines.”

“I told him very can­didly that this isn’t just about gun con­trol alone,” Stanek said. He said the big­ger issue is that the Jus­tice Department’s sys­tem for back­ground checks is incom­plete since many states don’t report men­tal health data or felony con­vic­tions. He men­tioned how in his home state of Min­nesota, a 14-year-old shot and killed his mother with a shot gun, but was later able legally to buy addi­tional hand­guns and auto­matic weapons because the back­ground check did not reveal his his­tory. “There’s exam­ple after exam­ple after exam­ple like that across the coun­try,” Stanek said.

Fitzger­ald said the men­tal health sys­tem needs to be bet­ter funded because jails across the coun­try are becom­ing “dump­ing grounds for the men­tally ill.”

“I was not the only sher­iff that spoke up on that issue,” Fitzger­ald said. “To me, that is the No. 1 thing if we are going to impact that kind of vio­lence that’s hap­pen­ing in America.”

All the law enforce­ment par­tic­i­pants inter­viewed said they appre­ci­ated the president’s atten­tion to the issue and found the meet­ing con­struc­tive. Manger said the pres­i­dent did a lot more lis­ten­ing than talk­ing and heard about the need to fund more police offi­cers to pro­tect school safety and a pro­posal to restrict the sale of ammu­ni­tion on the Inter­net besides the broad calls for stronger men­tal health and back­ground check systems.

Philadel­phia Police Com­mis­sioner Charles Ram­sey, pres­i­dent of the Major Cities Chiefs Asso­ci­a­tion, said he’s never been more encour­aged about the prospect of gun con­trol leg­is­la­tion of some sort, even if the assault weapons ban his group sup­ports is an uphill battle.

“You’re not going to get 100 per­cent of peo­ple to agree on any­thing as it relates to gun con­trol, and we’re no dif­fer­ent, but a major­ity of peo­ple in the room rec­og­nize that some­thing needs to be done,” he said. “This was not just a pass­ing thing as far as the pres­i­dent and vice pres­i­dent are con­cerned. This is some­thing that they are deter­mined to keep in front of the Amer­i­can peo­ple until they get some­thing passed.”

While the assault weapons ban was not a major focus of the White House meet­ing, par­tic­i­pants say it was dis­cussed at length at a later meet­ing with Sen. Dianne Fein­stein, D-Calif., who spon­sored a ban in 1994 that lasted for a decade and last week intro­duced a renewal of the ban in Congress.

“I would say her mes­sage was not well received over­all by the group,” Stanek said. “Every­one has an opin­ion on it one way or another.”

Posted by AP News on Jan 28 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.