For the 15th time in his nearly seven years in office, President Obama last week consoled the nation and demanded action on gun-control legislation — but America’s most recent mass shooting likely will serve as another reminder that the president’s bully pulpit simply isn’t powerful enough to drive change on the complex, contentious issue of Second Amendment rights.
Mr. Obama addressed the country just hours after a gunman killed nine people and wounded more than a dozen others at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, the 45th school shooting this year and the 142nd since the massacre at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, an incident that kick-started the White House’s aggressive push for new gun restrictions.
The president’s speech, specialists say, was familiar but also more impassioned than the ones he’d delivered following shootings at Sandy Hook; Charleston, South Carolina; Aurora, Colorado; and other sites of tragedy over the past three years. He scolded Congress and said lawmakers deserve some of the blame for the deaths at Umpqua for failing to enact meaningful gun law reforms as other advanced nations have done following similar incidents.
But for all of the attention he’s given to the issue of gun laws, mental health and related issues, the president has little to show for it.
Unlike his predecessor, former President Bill Clinton, who was able to marshal support for an assault-weapons ban and other gun control measures in the 1990s, Mr. Obama’s efforts have gone virtually nowhere.
Political analysts say Mr. Obama may now have a small window of opportunity, but they stress that the gun issue is so divisive it would consume the remainder of the president’s second term.
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“The White House, if they wanted to make some progress, could go all in and they could really make a stand. But that requires a significant lead-up of presidential time. It requires them to have a policy that is acceptable to the public,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston who has written on presidential leadership. “It requires, effectively, the president to bank his second term solely on this issue. … If he chose to make this the No. 1 issue between now and January of 2017, they could move the needle.”
For now, however, the White House continues to push gun control legislation that has virtually no chance of gaining traction on Capitol Hill. The president came out in strong support of a 2013 measure that would have expanded background checks for firearms purchases, a bill that arose in the months following the Sandy Hook killings.
Despite a small level of bipartisan support, that bill died in Congress amid staunch opposition from the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun groups.
Since then, Mr. Obama has urged Congress to take action, and he offered his most passionate — and, at times, angry — case for such action last Thursday evening as the body count at Umpqua was still rising.
“This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America,” he said during remarks at the White House. “We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”
Mr. Obama went on, “When Americans are killed in mine disasters, we work to make mines safer. When Americans are killed in floods and hurricanes, we make communities safer. When roads are unsafe, we fix them to reduce auto fatalities. We have seat belt laws because we know it saves lives. So the notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom and our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon, when there are law-abiding gun owners all across the country who could hunt and protect their families and do everything they do under such regulations doesn’t make sense.”
SEE ALSO: Kate Brown, Oregon governor: Not the time to talk gun control
Democrats on Capitol Hill immediately called on Republican leaders to bring gun control bills to the floors of the House and Senate. But even the strongest activists on gun regulations admitted within hours of the Umpqua massacre that nothing will happen in the foreseeable future.
Umpqua was “the 294th mass shooting in America during 2015. That is a shocking statistic that should spark action in Congress to strengthen our federal gun laws, but sadly, it probably won’t,” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said in a statement.
While virtually everyone agrees that guns must be kept out of the hands of the mentally ill, finding specific ways to accomplish that goal have proven difficult. In addition, polling consistently has shown that a majority of Americans oppose stricter gun laws.
Any renewed push on gun safety legislation also would come against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential race, in which Republican candidates will make the case that new gun legislation is a waste of time.
“Well, the gun laws have nothing to do with this. This isn’t guns. This is about, really, mental illness,” leading GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump told ABC’s “This Week” program on Sunday. ” … You’re always going to have difficulties, no matter how tight you run it.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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