Michael Goodwin
This is why we have a president. The question is whether the president we have will rise to the challenge.
Barack Obama gave an eloquent, heartfelt address at Sunday’s memorial service in Newtown, Conn. He said privately that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School made Friday “the worst day” of his tenure. The pain showed on his face.
But sharing the suffering of the 26 families who lost loved ones and calming a traumatized nation won’t be enough. As Mayor Bloomberg put it bluntly, “Being the consoler in chief is part of his job. His main job is being commander in chief, and I endorsed him, and I endorsed him because he said he believes in rational use of guns in this country, and I expect him to do exactly that.”
Leaving aside his inexact reference to commander in chief, Bloomberg is right to put the ball in the president’s court. It belongs there precisely because there are no easy and obvious answers to where America goes from here.
For sure, there are some straightforward steps that will mark a good start. A ban on automatic and semi-automatic rifles, along with outsized ammunition clips that have no rational civilian use, likely will find wide support now.
The goal is clear: Take the “mass” out of “mass murder,” as one observer put it.
Yet it is striking that parts of that ban were in effect for 10 years until 2004, and Democrats did nothing to revive it when they had full control of Washington in the first two years of Obama’s term. The inaction offers an insight not only into the tricky politics of gun control, which divides both parties, but how Obama picked his priorities.
He did not believe he was elected to refight the prosaic battles of past presidents. He made it clear he wanted to “transform” America, not merely reform it. Splitting his party over gun control would have cost political capital he wanted to save for other fights, such as ObamaCare and re-election.
So, as Bloomberg not so delicately put it, “The president spoke out visibly on gun violence after the mass shooting in Tucson two years ago. Yet since those shootings happened, more than 24,100 Americans have been murdered with guns.
“Had we done something then, a vast number of those would be alive today and their families wouldn’t have been torn asunder.”
There is truth in that claim, but it also unfairly mixes apples and oranges. The slaughter of 20 children is horrific beyond description, but the vast majority of murders happens alone. They are carried out primarily with handguns that didn’t fall under a federal ban then and won’t now.
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