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Will Washington push for new gun law? No way

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will not push for stricter gun laws this election year, the White House said Thursday, one day after his impassioned remarks about the need to keep assault weapons off the streets suggested he may plunge into that political fight and challenge Congress to act.

Instead, Obama's stand on the government's role ended up right where it was after the mass shooting in Colorado last week: Enforce existing law better.

That is same view held by his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, as both reach for broader and more politically appealing ways to keep guns away from killers.

Obama still wants Congress to reinstitute a federal ban on military-style assault weapons that lapsed years ago, his spokesman Jay Carney said. But the president is not pushing for that ban, a nod to the politics of gun control.

There is no interest among many lawmakers of both parties to take on the divisive matter. Especially not with an election in just over 100 days.

Sealing the matter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday the Senate's schedule is too packed to even have a debate on gun control.

Asked if the Senate might debate the issue next year, Reid said, “Nice try.”

Republicans historically oppose limits on the rights of gun owners. Democrats have come to view the issue as a political loser for them even as recent election results suggest the influence of the National Rifle Association has been overstated.

“Democrats have decided, I think wrongly politically and morally, that it's only an issue they can lose on,” said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the Senate's third-ranking Democrat who as a representative led the successful 1994 fight in the House to ban 19 military-style assault weapons, said there isn't much point in pushing for new laws restricting guns these days. “We see the power of the NRA around here,” he told reporters earlier this week.

“This is not a time to be bringing out all those old gun-control bills,” said Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican and the Senate's second-ranking Republican.

Democrats say they aren't trying anymore. The NRA's “political muscle” has “silenced pro-gun-control voices even to the point where we can't have a reasonable discussion about reasonable measures to try to take, really, weapons of war off the streets,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who, in his 2010 election campaign, favored tightening registration requirements for gun show dealers.

Public opinion has shifted away from tighter gun control. Twenty years ago, polls showed that a substantial majority supported stricter limits on guns. Now Americans appear evenly divided. Nearly every statement on the matter from Romney and Obama includes reminders they stand by the Second Amendment.

From the White House, Carney said: “There are things that we can do short of legislation and short of gun laws.”

The lack of legislation reflects that reality, too: Police say laws and background checks are often futile in keeping someone with horrifying intent from executing a massacre. Authorities say the suspect in the Aurora, Colo., shootings broke no laws when he purchased the guns he is accused of using, and he passed the required background checks.

Obama and his team “gain nothing politically, and they just don't have the horsepower to pass anything,” said William Vizzard, professor emeritus of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento, and an author on gun control politics. “And then the problem is trying to craft a law that would really do something.”

Yet at least one prominent gun control group sought Thursday to pressure Obama and Romney to offer voters concrete plans. The group's president, Dan Gross, said words alone were not enough in a nation in which 32 people are killed by guns each day. He specifically challenged Obama to move beyond the rhetoric.

“The president said very similar things in his last campaign,” said Gross, head of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “A speech is not a plan. An endorsement of a measure is not a solution.”

It was Obama who stirred the issue in speaking Wednesday night to the National Urban League, a civil rights organization whose mission is to help black Americans secure economic opportunity and power.

In his most extensive remarks on guns since the Colorado shooting left 12 dead and dozens wounded, Obama said steps to reduce violence have been opposed by Congress and “we should leave no stone unturned” in the national imperative of keeping young people safe.

And he got specific on assault-style weapons. “A lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals — that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities,” he said.

Obama's message was comprehensive, but he ultimately did not promise anything specific. He spoke of community policing strategies and mental health centers, or programs that steer people away into safe activities instead of gang violence, of ensuring that parents and teachers step in to fill a hole in a child's heart “that government alone cannot fill.”

Romney, in an interview Thursday with CNN, said new laws won't help. He cited the case of Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and put to death for the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. McVeigh used fertilizer in constructing his bomb.

“I think that the effort to continue to look for some law to somehow make violence go away is missing the point,” Romney said. “The real point has to relate to individuals that are deranged and distressed, and to find them and help them and to keep them from carrying out terrible acts.”

The ban on assault weapons that became law in 1994, during President Bill Clinton's first term, contributed to the Democrats' loss of Congress that year. It expired during George W. Bush's presidency in 2004.

The ban would have prevented the Colorado shooting suspect, James Holmes, from legally buying one of the four firearms police found on him and in his car, an assault rifle. It also would have prevented him from buying new high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Vizzard, the gun control scholar, said there are legislative ways to reduce gun violence, particularly over a longer term of 20 to 30 years. But with an estimated 300 million guns in the United States, he said, Obama is right that “the things that have the most impact are cultural” and that shape the behavior of young people.

Obama once got into his own firestorm during the 2008 presidential race by saying some bitter small-town residents cling to guns and religion for solace. This time, Vizzard said, the president will not give any material to critics who believe he is out to strip their gun rights.

“He's a cagey guy,” Vizzard said. “He's just not going to do it.”

Reluctance in Washington comes as gun ownership in the United States has declined from 54 percent of households in 1977 to one-third in 2010, according to the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control advocacy group in Washington.

In the Senate, a bloc of 27 Democrats have joined with Republicans as formidable opponents to recent gun-control initiatives. In 2009, they approved allowing checked guns on Amtrak rail cars and easing restrictions on guns in national parks.

The NRA derives its influence in part from its grade ratings of congressional lawmakers, which it sends to its members. Also, the group spent more than $7.2 million on contributions to congressional election campaigns in 2010.

Some say that the group's influence in campaigns is overstated. The NRA isn't the political kingmaker that lawmakers have come to fear, said Robert Spitzer, an author of four books on gun control, including “The Politics of Gun Control.”

“The NRA's actual political track record of defeating people who would otherwise win isn't very good,” Spitzer said.

The reluctance of Democrats on the issue stems partly from the fact that the party's loss of control of Congress in the 1994 midterm election was blamed on a semiautomatic weapons ban passed earlier that year. It has become an article of faith among Democrats since then that passage of gun control measures leads to election losses.

Two months before the November election, Congress passed a 10-year ban on assault weapons and former President Bill Clinton signed it. Clinton, in his 2004 memoir, attributed the Democrats' midterm loss to the gun issue.

Five years later, Vice President Al Gore cast a tie-breaking Senate vote on legislation to restrict sales at gun shows before losing the election to former President George W. Bush, a strong supporter of gun rights.

“There's a lot of mythology out there” about the power of the NRA, said Dan Gross, president of the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun-control advocacy group.

Most recently, Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, survived a 2010 onslaught of NRA spending. In 2008, Obama won 11 of the 13 states where the group ran attack ads, including Colorado, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to the Brady Campaign.

The NRA declined to comment. “NRA believes that now is the time for families to grieve and for the community to heal,” said Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs.

The American Prospect magazine analyzed NRA political spending and endorsements over the past four election cycles and concluded “it's almost impossible to locate any kind of impact of the NRA's actions,” said the author, Paul Waldman.

The NRA spreads spending to more than 200 House races in each election, diluting its influence. The typical contribution to a House candidate was about $2,500, including both primary and general-election contributions. Spending in a competitive House race can run to about $1 million.

In the Senate, the NRA's typical contribution is $5,000, accounting for an even smaller share of candidate spending. In the last four Senate elections, the NRA spent more than $100,000 on 22 Senate races. The group's favored candidate won 10 times and lost 12 times.

Until recent decades, gun massacres prompted federal legislation to tighten access rights.

The first modern U.S. gun law was passed in New York in 1911. The law restricted access to handguns after an attempt to assassinate the mayor, William Gaynor.

The early 1930s, gangland crime sprees of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and bank robber “Pretty Boy” Floyd prompted the National Firearms Act of 1934. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was precipitated by the assassinations of Senator and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and civil rights advocate Martin Luther King Jr.

It wasn't until the 1999 Columbine massacre at a Colorado high school that killed 12 students and a teacher that lawmakers didn't respond with gun-control legislation.

Senate Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois said he couldn't recall any real discussion after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 or after former representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot and wounded last year.

“If one of our own is shot point-blank in the head at a town meeting that certainly should rouse the conscience of members of Congress to talk in honest terms about how to make this a safer nation,” he said.

Polls show support for gun-control measures. Eighty-seven percent of Americans support background checks on private sales of guns, including sales at gun shows, according to an April 2008 poll by Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research.

Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults say it is more important to allow the government to ban the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons than it is to protect the rights of gun owners to purchase any guns they want, according to a June 2011 Time poll.

Still, Congress hasn't followed with legislation in recent years. Bush allowed the assault weapons ban to lapse in 2004 and there's been little momentum for renewing it. James Holmes, the alleged Colorado shooter, had purchased an AR-15 assault rifle, which had been outlawed before 2004.

“Democrats are thinking: Why are we going to take the political pain when it's going to be very difficult to get through the House and partially in the Senate?” said Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence in Washington.

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting. Spitzer said this also feeds into lawmakers' reticence.

Spitzer also said there is an “asymmetry” between gun- rights supporters and gun-control advocates. “It's a case of a small, highly motivated minority that's done pretty well over an apathetic majority,” he said.

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