WASHINGTON - Three months after the Newtown shooting, President Barack Obama said Americans and lawmakers should be ashamed if they’ve forgotten the calls for tighter gun laws that followed the elementary-school massacre.
“The entire country was shocked, and the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different,” Obama said Thursday at the White House. “Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”
Obama’s remarks were aimed at reviving the stalled momentum for new gun-control laws, an effort that been crowded out by other issues and stalled in Congress.
Although the Senate is expected to begin voting on a bill when it returns from a recess the week of April 8, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has not yet struck a deal on key details and lawmakers have said major provisions backed by the president - bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines - will not be included in the package, although they will be proposed separately.
A spokesman for the National Rifle Association, the politically powerful gunrights organization, said Obama should stop holding news conferences and do his job.
“If President Obama wanted to reduce gun violence in this country, then he would start instructing its Justice Department to prosecute gun crime,” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said.
Obama’s remarks, his first extended comments on the subject in more than a month, came on a “dayof action” coordinated by gun-control advocates trying to keep the pressure on lawmakers.
Standing with a group of mothers of gun victims, the president issued an unusually direct warning for lawmakers.
“If enough members of Congress take a stand for cooperation and common sense and lead and don’t get squishy because time has passed and maybe it’s not on the news every single day,” the president said, “if that’s who we are, that’s our character that we’re willing to follow through on commitments that we say areimportant, commitments to each other and to our kids, then I’m confident we can make this country a safer place for all of them.”
Obama’s message was aimed at Republicans and Democrats in the Senate. While a group of Democratic lawmakers has been seeking Republican support for legislation that would expand the background check system, other Democrats have suggested they aren’t on board and Democratic leaders decided not to include the assault-weapons and high-capacity magazines bans in the bill.
“The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we’ve moved on to other things - that’s not who we are. That’s not who we are,” Obama said.
Obama was introduced by Katerina Rodgaard ofMaryland, a lawyer, teacher and mother of two children who lost one of her dance students, Reema Samaha, 18, in the massacre at Virginia Tech six years ago. After Newtown, Rodgaard said, she “no longer felt it was safe to raise a family in this country.”
Mayors Against Illegal Guns, one of the nation’s leading gun-control groups, founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on Thursday started airing the first TV ads featuring family members of those killed in Newtown. The ads are airing in Connecticut.
Obama will travel Wednesday to Denver to continue his push for gun legislation.
Information for this article was contributed by Kathleen Hennessey of the Tribune Washington Bureau and by Anita Kumar of McClatchy Newspapers.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 03/29/2013