President Barack Obama wipes his eye as he talks about the Connecticut elementary school shooting, Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, in the White House briefing room in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Could shooting be a gun-control tipping point?
President Barack Obama wipes his eye as he talks about the Connecticut elementary school shooting, Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, in the White House briefing room in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
By CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press /
December 15, 2012
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Likewise, early last year, Obama weighed in on guns after an assailant killed six people and wounded 13, shooting then-Rep. Giffords in the head outside a grocery store in Tucson, Ariz. The president called for ‘‘sound and effective steps’’ in gun laws as part of a ‘‘new discussion on how we can keep America safe for all our people.’’ He soon went back to silence on the topic and gun-control advocates waited in vain for the steps.
With his last presidential campaign behind him, Obama is freer to take up contentious matters that he wouldn’t touch when he was an incumbent seeking re-election. Odds are favorable that he will have at least one vacancy to fill on a Supreme Court now closely divided on gun cases.
The Aurora attack happened in the heat of the campaign, when Democrats wanted no trouble from gun owners. In its first official response to the killings, Obama’s White House pledged to protect fundamental gun rights. Obama and his spokesmen never failed to couple his wish for ‘‘common-sense measures’’ with his devotion to the Second Amendment.
But after the massacre of children Friday, Obama spoke mainly of the anguish, and the need for action, and not at all about the right to bear arms.
By the standards of gun-control politics, that alone was a crack in the status quo.
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Associated Press writer Matt Apuzzo in Newtown, Conn., contributed to this report.
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