One year ago, in the wake of the horrific school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., the Obama White House released its agenda for “protect[ing] our children and communities by reducing gun violence.” It was a report marked by a tone of grim urgency from its title onward: “Now Is the Time” to tighten background checks for guns, ban “military-style assault weapons,” and fortify our schools.

Yet the president appeared comparatively restrained next to the National Rifle Association‘s Wayne LaPierre, who breathlessly demanded “an active national database of the mentally ill” and federally funded “armed police officers in every school” or Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who proposed legislation encouraging governors to call out the National Guard for school shootings. At the time I worried that this legislative panic attack would leave us no safer, and considerably less free.