Need assault-gun ban, lawmakers say

Listen to voters, not NRA, urge Democrats in wake of school massacre

— Democratic lawmakers and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman said Sunday that military style assault weapons should be banned and that a national commission should be established to examine mass shootings in the United States.

The proposals were among the first to come from Congress in the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Newtown, Conn. Democrats vowed action and said it was time to hear from voters - not gun lobbyists - on how to prevent the next shooting.

The time for “saying that we can’t talk about the policy implications of tragedies like this is over,” said Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who won a Senate seat in the November elections. Murphy spoke on ABC’s This Week.

President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats haven’t pushed for new gun controls since rising to power in the 2008 national elections. Outspoken advocates for stricter laws, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that’s because of the powerful sway of the National Rifle Association.

The Fairfax, Va.-based association, which describes itself as the nation’s foremost defender of Second Amendment rights, works to defeat gun limits nationally and in states, and has successfully championed permissive firearms laws.

Since a 1994 federal assault-weapon ban expired in 2004, Congress hasn’t enacted major firearms regulations other than a law aimed at improving state reporting for federal background checks.

But advocates also said the latest shooting is a tipping point that could change the dynamic of the debate dramatically. Feinstein, D-Calif., said she will propose legislation next year that would ban big clips, drums and strips of more than 10 bullets.

“It can be done,” she said Sunday of reviving the ban that expired in 2004.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Obama could use executive powers to enforce existing gun laws, as well as throw his weight behind legislation such as Feinstein’s.

“It’s time for the president, I think, to stand up and lead and tell this country what we should do - not go to Congress and say, ‘What do you guys want to do?”’ Bloomberg said on Meet the Press.

Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who is retiring, supports such a ban but said there should also be a national commission to scrutinize gun laws, as well as the nation’s mental-health system and the role that violent video games and movies might play in shootings. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said he would support such a panel, adding that it was time for a “national discussion” that included school safety.

“This conversation has been dominated in Washington by - you know and I know - gun lobbies that have an agenda,” Durbin said on Fox News Sunday. “We need people, just ordinary Americans, to come together, and speak out, and to sit down and calmly reflect on how far we go.”

Congress has frequently turned to independent bipartisan commissions to try to solve the nation’s worst problems, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Iraq war and the ailing economy. But ultimately, lawmakers are often reluctant to act on the recommendations of outsiders, especially if they think it will cost them support in their home states.

Still, Lieberman defended the idea of a national commission as the only way to ensure that the “heartbreak and anger” of the Connecticut shooting doesn’t dissipate over time and that other factors beyond gun control are considered.

“We’ve got to continue to hear the screams of these children and see their blood until we do something to try to prevent this from happening again,” he said on Fox News Sunday.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, was the sole representative of gun-rights activists on the various Sunday talk shows. In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Gohmert defended the sale of assault weapons and said that the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who authorities say died trying to overtake the shooter, should herself have been armed.

“I wish to God she had had an M4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands. But she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids,” Gohmert said.

Gohmert also argued violence is lower in cities with lax gun laws, and higher in cities with stricter laws.

“The facts are that every time guns have been allowed -conceal-carry [gun laws] have been allowed - the crime rate has gone down,” Gohmert said.

Gun-control advocates said that isn’t true. A study by the California-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence determined that seven of the 10 states with the strongest gun laws - including Connecticut, Massachusetts and California - are also among the 10 states with the lowest gun death rates.

“If you look at the states with the strongest gun laws in the country, they have some of the lowest gun death rates, and some of the states with the weakest gun laws have some of the highest gun death rates,” said Brian Malte of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Others blamed not concealed-carry laws, but a lack of restrictions on ammunition for the massacre at the school.

Magazines that fed bullets into the rifle used in the school shooting would have been banned under legislation in Connecticut that the National Rifle Association and gun makers successfully fought.

The gunman used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle with magazines containing 30 rounds as his main weapon, said Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance at a news conference Sunday.

A proposal in March 2011 would have made it a felony to possess magazines with more than 10 bullets and required owners to surrender them to law enforcement or remove them from the state. Opponents sent more than 30,000 e-mails and letters to state lawmakers as part of a campaign organized by the National Rifle Association and other gun advocates, said Robert Crook, head of the Hartford- based Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen, which opposed the legislation.

“The legislators got swamped by NRA e-mails,” said Betty Gallo, who lobbied on behalf of the legislation for Southport-based Connecticut Against Gun Violence. “They were scared of the NRA and the political backlash.”

Proponents abandoned the legislation, which drew opposition from gun makers including Sturm, Ruger &Co. In addition to the e-mails and letters, more than 300 pro-gun activists, including many National Rifle Association members, attended a committee hearing to oppose it, said Gallo, a Hartford based lobbyist for more than 35 years. James Debney, chief executive office of Smith & Wesson Holding Corp., wrote to Fox before the hearing that the proposal would “drastically impact the numerous firearms companies in Connecticut and across New England.”

This weekend, people on both sides of the debate disputed the role of high-capacity magazines in Friday’s shooting.

Crook said state legislation “wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“We already have a lot of good gun laws on the books,” Crook said. “You can’t control people who have never done anything wrong before and then just go off the deep end.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said high-capacity magazines “made the crime all the more deadly” and called for limits.

The media office of the National Rifle Association didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment about the shooting or the law, or return phone messages left with an answering service.

Last year, Andrew Jennison, an association lobbyist at the time, told Connecticut lawmakers there was “no correlation” between crime and magazine capacity, pointing to the 2007 massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va., in which 33 people died. In that shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history, Seung-Hui Cho used 10- and 15-round magazines.

RAPID LOADERS

“Even pistols with rapid loaders could have been about as deadly in this situation,” Jennison said, according to a transcript of the committee hearing. “It is the criminal use of firearms, not mere possession of a magazine with an arbitrary number of rounds.”

Connecticut’s gun laws are fifth-strictest among states, according to a 2011 scorecard from the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which describes itself as the country’s largest gun-control lobby.

Connecticut is among six states that require background checks on all handgun sales, according to the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Connecticut has a measure, sometimes referred to as the “turn in your neighbor” law, that lets state police obtain a warrant to confiscate firearms from anyone posing an imminent risk of harming someone. Police obtained nearly 300 warrants and seized more than 2,000 guns in 10 years after the law was passed in 1999, according to a state Office of Legislative Research report.

In an interview on Sunday, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he doubted that the shootings in Connecticut would alter the gun debate in Congress, saying that outside the Northeast a gun culture exists that is resistant to any kind of firearms regulation.

“I hope I am wrong,” he said, “but I don’t think it will have a major impact on the debate in Congress. We’ve had a number of gun tragedies in recent years without any action being taken.” Information for this article was contributed by Anne Flaherty and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press; by Michael C. Bender, Freeman Klopott and Phil Mattingly of Bloomberg News; and by Raymond Hernandez of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/17/2012

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