Barack Obama has been in our field of vision for a long time now, and, more than any major politician of recent memory, he hides in plain sight. He is who he is. He may strike the unsympathetic as curiously remote or arrogant or removed; he certainly strikes his admirers as a man of real intelligence and dignity. But he is who he is. He is no phony. And so there is absolutely no reason to believe that his deep, raw emotion today following the horrific slaughter in Connecticut—his tears, the prolonged catch in his voice—was anything but genuine. But this was a slaughter—a slaughter like so many before it—and emotion is hardly all that is needed. What is needed is gun control—strict, comprehensive gun control that places the values of public safety and security before the values of deer hunting and a perverse ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment. Obama told the nation that he reacted to the shootings in Newtown “as a parent,” and that is understandable, but what we need most is for him to act as a President, liberated at last from the constraints of elections and their dirty compromises—a President who dares to change the national debate and the legislative agenda on guns.
So far, Obama, who has shown far greater nerve on a range of issues from health care to gay rights, has held himself hostage to the political adage that there is no ground to be gained in proposing anything stronger than piecemeal gun legislation. He has held himself hostage to the electoral calculus that swing-state voters—in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Colorado, for starters—would reject him if he went deeper on the gun issue. But he won those states. Now it is time for him to risk their affections—to risk disapproval in general—in the name of saving lives.
The Obama-Romney debates were disgraceful in a number of ways: their obsession with the phony Benghazi issue (which has now sunk Susan Rice as a potential Secretary of State); their failure to debate the world beyond Israel; the lack of a single question about climate change. One of the most dispiriting exchanges came when Candy Crowley of CNN had a woman named Nina Gonzalez ask about gun control:
QUESTION: President Obama, during the Democratic National Convention in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your Administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?
OBAMA: We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves.
But there have been too many instances during the course of my Presidency, where I’ve had to comfort families who have lost somebody. Most recently out in Aurora….
So my belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement.
But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theatres don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault-weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.
And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control….
It was fine that Obama favored renewing the federal-assault weapons ban that ran out in 2004, but he knew well that the ban had not been nearly enough. He also knew that many Democratic legislators had lost their seats when they dared to challenge the orthodoxy promulgated by the National Rifle Association. It is hard to believe that Obama, a decidedly liberal teacher of constitutional law at the University of Chicago and a former protégé of Laurence Tribe at Harvard Law School, really and truly believes that the Second Amendment is to be read the way that the N.R.A. and the Republican Party say it is.
When he was a young politician on the South Side of Chicago, Obama took a less frustrating view of things. He was living in a city where the media was filled every day with reports of gun mayhem, and his view was firm. In 1996, when he ran for state senator in the Hyde Park area, his campaign filled out a questionnaire on his behalf that had been issued by the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organizations, in which he was asked, among other things, “Do you support state legislation to: ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?” Obama’s campaign answered “Yes.”
But Obama’s circle in the 2008 campaign knew the perils of such a clear-cut answer, and Robert Gibbs, the candidate’s close adviser and eventual press secretary, cast doubt on whether Obama’s team in 1996 had reflected his position accurately. “Why [his aide] filled out the questionnaire the way she did I have no idea, because it didn’t reflect his views,” Gibbs said at the time. The 1996 questionnaire also reflected similarly liberal views on abortion and the death penalty—views that Obama would later moderate, claiming that he had never approved the questionnaire.
It remains a question whether Obama’s 1996 staffer truly failed to reflect the nuances of Obama’s views. That is for the historians. And, at the moment, it barely matters. What matters is that Obama, having just won reëlection, is liberated to do the right thing. After the Tucson shootings, he talked about having—cliché of clichés—a “national conversation” about gun violence “not only about the motivations behind these killings but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental-health system.” This conversation never happened; further gun violence, of course, did.
A report in the National Journal points out that gun sales have gone up during Obama’s first term; the report attributes the sales spike to fears by gun owners that the President was on the brink of making moves to restrict gun purchases. If only it were true. Gun ownership is on the decline, over-all, but America still has a horrific gun problem. As Ezra Klein points out in the Washington Post, eleven of the worst twenty mass shootings in the past half century have taken place in the U.S.
President Obama is a decent man, and he clearly felt the tragedy in Connecticut deeply. That was evident from his brief statement at the White House today. We have grown accustomed to what will happen next. The President will likely visit a funeral or a memorial service and, at greater length, comfort the families of the victims, the community, and the nation. He will be eloquent. He will give voice to the common grief, the common confusion, the common outrage. But then what? A “conversation”? Let there be a conversation. But also let there be decisive action from a President who is determined not only to feel our pain but, calling on the powers of his office, to feel the urge to prevent more suffering. His reading of the Constitution should no longer be constrained by a sense of what the conventional wisdom is in this precinct or that. Let him begin his campaign for a more secure and less violent America in the state of Connecticut.
Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.
See our full coverage of the Newtown shooting.
So far, Obama, who has shown far greater nerve on a range of issues from health care to gay rights, has held himself hostage to the political adage that there is no ground to be gained in proposing anything stronger than piecemeal gun legislation. He has held himself hostage to the electoral calculus that swing-state voters—in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Colorado, for starters—would reject him if he went deeper on the gun issue. But he won those states. Now it is time for him to risk their affections—to risk disapproval in general—in the name of saving lives.
The Obama-Romney debates were disgraceful in a number of ways: their obsession with the phony Benghazi issue (which has now sunk Susan Rice as a potential Secretary of State); their failure to debate the world beyond Israel; the lack of a single question about climate change. One of the most dispiriting exchanges came when Candy Crowley of CNN had a woman named Nina Gonzalez ask about gun control:
QUESTION: President Obama, during the Democratic National Convention in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your Administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?
OBAMA: We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves.
But there have been too many instances during the course of my Presidency, where I’ve had to comfort families who have lost somebody. Most recently out in Aurora….
So my belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement.
But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theatres don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault-weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.
And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control….
It was fine that Obama favored renewing the federal-assault weapons ban that ran out in 2004, but he knew well that the ban had not been nearly enough. He also knew that many Democratic legislators had lost their seats when they dared to challenge the orthodoxy promulgated by the National Rifle Association. It is hard to believe that Obama, a decidedly liberal teacher of constitutional law at the University of Chicago and a former protégé of Laurence Tribe at Harvard Law School, really and truly believes that the Second Amendment is to be read the way that the N.R.A. and the Republican Party say it is.
When he was a young politician on the South Side of Chicago, Obama took a less frustrating view of things. He was living in a city where the media was filled every day with reports of gun mayhem, and his view was firm. In 1996, when he ran for state senator in the Hyde Park area, his campaign filled out a questionnaire on his behalf that had been issued by the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organizations, in which he was asked, among other things, “Do you support state legislation to: ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?” Obama’s campaign answered “Yes.”
But Obama’s circle in the 2008 campaign knew the perils of such a clear-cut answer, and Robert Gibbs, the candidate’s close adviser and eventual press secretary, cast doubt on whether Obama’s team in 1996 had reflected his position accurately. “Why [his aide] filled out the questionnaire the way she did I have no idea, because it didn’t reflect his views,” Gibbs said at the time. The 1996 questionnaire also reflected similarly liberal views on abortion and the death penalty—views that Obama would later moderate, claiming that he had never approved the questionnaire.
It remains a question whether Obama’s 1996 staffer truly failed to reflect the nuances of Obama’s views. That is for the historians. And, at the moment, it barely matters. What matters is that Obama, having just won reëlection, is liberated to do the right thing. After the Tucson shootings, he talked about having—cliché of clichés—a “national conversation” about gun violence “not only about the motivations behind these killings but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental-health system.” This conversation never happened; further gun violence, of course, did.
A report in the National Journal points out that gun sales have gone up during Obama’s first term; the report attributes the sales spike to fears by gun owners that the President was on the brink of making moves to restrict gun purchases. If only it were true. Gun ownership is on the decline, over-all, but America still has a horrific gun problem. As Ezra Klein points out in the Washington Post, eleven of the worst twenty mass shootings in the past half century have taken place in the U.S.
President Obama is a decent man, and he clearly felt the tragedy in Connecticut deeply. That was evident from his brief statement at the White House today. We have grown accustomed to what will happen next. The President will likely visit a funeral or a memorial service and, at greater length, comfort the families of the victims, the community, and the nation. He will be eloquent. He will give voice to the common grief, the common confusion, the common outrage. But then what? A “conversation”? Let there be a conversation. But also let there be decisive action from a President who is determined not only to feel our pain but, calling on the powers of his office, to feel the urge to prevent more suffering. His reading of the Constitution should no longer be constrained by a sense of what the conventional wisdom is in this precinct or that. Let him begin his campaign for a more secure and less violent America in the state of Connecticut.
Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.
See our full coverage of the Newtown shooting.
