WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama today will unveil a package of proposals to cut gun violence, including a ban on sales of assault weapons that faces opposition in Congress even as a poll shows a majority of the public backs it.
In New York on Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo won a legislative vote to toughen gun controls and make it easier to keep firearms from the mentally ill, making the state the first to respond to the Newtown, Conn., school massacre.
Today, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will be joined by children who wrote the president expressing their concerns after the Newtown shooting last month for the announcement, scheduled for 10:45 a.m. Central time at the White House, Jay Carney, the president’s chief spokesman, said.
Obama “will broadly address the steps forward he believes we need to take as a nation” to curb gun violence, and a “significant” portion of the proposals will require action by Congress, Carney said. “The president’s committed to this.”
While Carney refused to preview what the president will introduce, other administration officials said Obama will ask for universal background checks for firearms buyers and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.
Initiatives to strengthen mental-health checks, tighten school safety, address cultural influences such as violent movies and video games, and improve the government’s ability to col- lect information about gun violence are also on the list, according to the officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss details before the event.
The plan will include 19 separate steps Obama could take through executive action, prompting complaints from Republicans that he will abuse the authority of his office to monitor gun owners and restrict their rights.
Obama, speaking Monday on the one-month anniversary of the Newtown school shooting, which killed 20 children and six school employees, said some of his proposals may not become law.
“We’re going to have to come up with answers that set politics aside, and that’s what I expect Congress to do,” Obama told reporters at a White House news conference. “Will all of them get through this Congress? I don’t know. But what’s uppermost in my mind is making sure I’m honest with the American people and Congress about what I think will work.”
Congressional Democrats shared the president’s skepticism. They said that passing gun legislation will be difficult with lawmakers mired in a debate over government spending, deficit reduction and raising the country’s $16.4 trillion debt limit.
“How far the shift in attitudes will go on gun-violence prevention remains to be seen, in part because there are other competing initiatives that the president is pursuing,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, DConn., who’s dedicated much of his time to working on the gun issue since the Dec. 14 shootings.
Reinstating an expired 1994 assault-weapons ban, administration officials have indicated, will be among the most difficult to pass, given opposition from gun-rights groups and their allies on Capitol Hill.
“The likelihood is that they are not going to be able to get an assault-weapons ban through this Congress,” David Keene, the president of the National Rifle Association, said Sunday in an interview with CNN.
SUPPORT FOR BAN GROWING
While allies expressed support for the White House plans, some Democrats urged the president to take a narrower approach, concentrating on expanding background checks and limiting high-capacity ammunition magazines, proposals that even many gun owners back.
Support fo r ba nning high-capacity magazines has reached a new high, at 65 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Monday. The survey has tracked the issue since early 2011.
Requiring background checks on firearms buyers at gun shows has the support of 88 percent of Americans, while 58 percent want to ban the sale of assault weapons, the poll found. Fifty-five percent back the NRA’s call for armed guards in schools.
This poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday, among a random national sample of 1,001 adults. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Obama is reviewing proposals gathered by Biden, who spent decades in the Senate working on gun restrictions and was appointed by the president to lead an administrationwide effort to craft a policy response.
Biden met Monday with the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, a group of House Democrats, including Thompson and Rep. Ron Barber, D-Ariz., who was wounded in the same 2011 shooting that injured his then-boss, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.
Thompson, along with a number of Democrats including Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, encouraged the administration to include measures on school safety, such as funding more police officers in public schools and installing classroom doors that lock from the inside.
The Biden meeting was one of several the vice president hosted with stakeholders in the gun debate, including victims groups as well as the NRA.
Once Obama releases his recommendations, the focus will shift to Congress, where a number of members are already planning to offer legislation. Among them is Feinstein, D-Calif., who has said she will introduce a bill expanding the classification of assault weapons and prohibiting their sale and importation.
Biden has told lawmakers the administration intends to use White House powers to act on new policies, saying officials have gathered a list of measures that can be taken without congressional approval.
Those options have invited opposition from Republicans, who maintain the president is overreaching the power of his office. Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, said he’d file articles of impeachment if the president uses executive actions to restrict gun rights.
Forty-seven percent of the members of the House received funding from the NRA’s political action committee in their most recent race, according to an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based group that tracks political giving.
NEW YORK’S GUN LAW
The bill passed by the New York Assembly on Tuesday and the Senate on Monday night tightens restrictions on sales, bars ammunition magazines that hold more than seven rounds and closes gaps in a 2000 ban on assault weapons, which Cuomo said has “more holes than Swiss cheese.” It also gives authorities ways to seize guns owned by mentally ill people deemed to be a threat.
“This unfortunately required tragedy and loss of life to spur the political process to action,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said before signing the law in Albany. “This is a gun-control bill that actually exercises common sense.”
Lawmakers’ approval makes New York the first to act on growing calls for tighter limits on firearms since the Newtown shooting. Democratic governors and lawmakers in at least 10 states are seeking new controls, challenging the firearms lobby’s clout.
“Cuomo seized the opportunity to exploit tragedy and put his own personal politics ahead of sound public policy,” the NRA said in a statement posted on its website. The governor, the NRA said, was “determined to steal the thunder from an anti-gun White House.”
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the legislation is “not everything some people would want, but it’s a big step in the direction.” He is co-founder of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group of more than 700 municipal chief executives that has called for regulations to keep firearms from criminals, terrorists and the mentally ill.
“We have some of the toughest gun laws in the country, and this just strengthens them,” said the mayor.
Cuomo’s measure also outlaws the weapon used in Newtown, according to a statement provided by Cuomo’s office. Under the existing ban, a firearm needed to have a combination of military-style characteristics such as a pistol grip and a flash suppressor to be illegal. Now a semi-automatic rifle or pistol with detachable magazine needs to have only one of those features to be deemed illegal.
The changes make New York the first U.S. state to require real-time background checks for ammunition, according to Cuomo’s office. The checks would alert lawenforcement officials to highvolume buyers. The measure also prohibits the sale of ammunition over the Internet.
The expanded ban goes into effect immediately and allows those already owning the weapons to keep them, though they can be sold only out of state.
In a concession to the progun side, local authorities will be allowed to withhold the identities of registered gun owners — an issue that arose recently when a suburban New York City newspaper published the names and addresses of gun owners in its readership area.
Information for this article was contributed by Roger Runningen, Freeman Klopott, William Selway and Henry Goldman of Bloomberg News; by The Washington Post and by Michael Virtanen, Michael Gormley and Carolyn Thompson of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/16/2013