In pre-taped interview with Meet the Press host David Gregory that aired during the show Sunday morning, President Barack Obama said he has not ruled out the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) proposal to put armed guards in school.
The President said he would continue to back a new assault rifle ban and a ban on high capacity clips, as well as better background checks and whatever Joe Biden’s gun regulation commission decides to propose. Surprisingly, he did not reject the NRA’s demand that Congress pass legislation requiring every school in America to be protected by an armed police officer.
“I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools, and I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem,” Obama told Gregory. Yet, the President also said he would not “prejudge the recommendations that are given to me.”
Obama’s openness to national legislation that would put police in schools is interesting because a program similar to the one proposed by the NRA recently ended on Obama’s watch. The Secure our Schools program, which gave schools federal grants to place armed police in schools, ended at the beginning of this year after being in place since 1999 under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in one form or another. Obama’s Department of Justice decided to allow the program to sunset at the end of 2011 to save money.
In his Meet the Press interview, the President again called on Americans to do “some soul searching” on supporting more aggressive restrictions on their Second Amendment rights because “something fundamental in America has to change.”
Obama admitted that passing new gun control laws would be “hard,” but stood by his claim that resistance to such laws is not an excuse not to try.
“And the question then becomes, you know, whether we are actually shook up enough by what happened here that it does not just become another one of these routine episodes where it gets a lot of attention for a couple of weeks and then it drifts away. It certainly won’t feel like that to me,” the President said. “That was the worst day of my presidency. And it’s not something that I want to see repeated.”
But if Americans want Congress to pass stricter gun laws, they need to speak up, the President said. Obama told Gregory that while he would like to see a national conservation on gun control in the next year, “but ultimately, the way this is going to happen is because the American people say, ‘That’s right. We are willing to make different choices for the country, and we support those in Congress who are willing to take those actions.’ ”
While the President took the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. personally enough to vigorously seek new gun control measures, the public is still divided on how it wants Congress to react. In a CBS poll taken directly after the shooting, 50 percent of Americans said they thought stricter gun laws wouldn’t have prevented the Newtown massacre. And even after the bad press the NRA received in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, Gallup found that more Americans still view the organization favorably than view it unfavorably. In fact, the number of Americans who view the organization very favorably is at it’s highest point since the first assault weapons ban in 1994.
Regardless of public opinion, the likelihood that Congress will approve new gun regulations in the next year is incredibly slim. Though the legislation could pass in the Senate, where Sen. Dianne Feinstein has committed to introducing new legislation to ban the sale of assault rifle’s and other guns for non-military use that liberals think are too dangerous for average Americans to posses, the legislation would undeniably fail in the Republican held House.
