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(CBS News) The national conversation about gun control has re-emerged following the deadly attack in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater overnight. © 2012 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Gun control debate returns after Colorado shooting
Police on the scene at the Century 16 movie theater, where a gunman attacked moviegoers during an early morning screening of the new Batman movie, "The Dark Knight Rises," July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colo.
/ Thomas Cooper"Maybe it's time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a gun control advocate, said early Friday morning.
Bloomberg: Hold Obama, Romney accountable on guns
"The shooter should be brought to justice and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York, a Democrat whose husband was killed in a mass shooting on a train, said Friday morning. "But we as a nation should also not continue to ignore avenues to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the future."
(Flags over the White House and U.S. Capitol lower to half-staff on Friday.)
Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, a Republican, said the story made him wonder, "With all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying a gun that could have stopped this guy more quickly?" (Gohmert also tied the tragedy to the "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs.")
Online, meanwhile, debate was raging.
"A pre-emptive you should be ashamed of yourselves to any portion of the Federal government that doesn't at least try to have a conversation about guns after what happened today," wrote Daniel Gendler on Facebook. "Obama had a golden opportunity with Gabby Gifford[s], don't let this one slip away as well."
Giffords "horrified" by Colorado shooting
Jedediah Bila had this to say on Twitter: "Reminder to the gun control crowd: Guns don't kill people. People kill people. P.S.--Criminals & lunatics don't obey gun laws."
Both President Obama and Mitt Romney did not address gun control issues in their initial statements on the tragedy. In a press release Friday, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence proclaimed, "We Don't Want Sympathy From The President Or Other Elected Officials; We Invite Americans To Join Our Campaign To Hold Politicians Accountable To Act."
Obama leads moment of silence for Aurora victims
Romney offers prayers, urges unity after Colorado shooting
Gun control advocates say there has been a distressing lack of action on their issue under the Obama administration.
"The president has not shown sufficient leadership on the gun issue," Dennis Henigan, vice president of the Brady Campaign, said in an interview. He noted that the president has not followed through on a campaign promise to try to reinstate an assault weapons ban and has not proposed any gun legislation in office.
Henigan said there have been signs, however, that Mr. Obama "has shown a willingness to stand up to the gun lobby" in recent years. He pointed to the president's Supreme Court appointments and an ATF regulation to combat gun trafficking to Mexico, both of which were opposed by the National Rifle Association. "He knew that by doing so he would incur their wrath, and he certainly has," said Henigan.
Mr. Obama was widely criticized for his comment in the 2008 campaign that some voters "cling to guns or religion," which is believed to have cost him votes in Southwest Pennsylvania and other areas of the country where guns are a fact of life.
(NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg calls on Obama and Romney to get specific on gun control in a "Face the Nation" interview.)
Gun sales surgedafter Mr. Obama won office, out of an apparent fear that he would mandate stricter gun control laws. But no legislation has been passed to limit the availability of guns under the president, despite the 2011 shooting rampage in Tucson that killed six people and badly wounded Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Indeed, the shift has largely been in the opposite direction, with states passing laws that allow guns and bars and Congress allowing loaded guns to be carried in national parks.
That's due in part to shifting public opinion: According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who want gun laws to be stricter fell from 78 percent in 1990 to 62 percent in 1995. By 2007, it was down to 51 percent. And last year it was just 44 percent in Gallup polling. It's also tied to the strength of the NRA, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington; lawmakers that defy the NRA know they are making a powerful enemy that could spend millions of dollars to defeat them.
Today's shooting tragedy in Colorado is likely to renew pressure on lawmakers to pass legislation to prevent attacks like this in the future. Yet recent history suggests serious gun control legislation as a result of the tragedy is unlikely: While the Columbine, Virginia Tech and Tuscon shootings prompted the now-familiar debates that have already begun in the wake of the Aurora attack, they did not lead to serious changes in gun control laws.
Henigan said he hoped this time would be different.
"We hope that the cumulative impact of these continuing tragedies will ultimately lead our politicians to begin to respond to the need for public safety, the need to stop this violence, instead of simply doing the bidding of the gun lobby," he said. "And this being an election year, I believe that the American people will say, as they say over and over again, 'enough is enough.'"
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I have been living within this nation since a beginning back in the depths of the Great Depression and there were some guns back then, but they we not viewed as sacred talismans that should be carried by everyone that wanted to stand up for an old-time gun religion. And until just the last few years I knew of no one anywhere that went anywhere packing gun aside from an occasional hunter taking a shotgun or four-ten out on the edge of town to bag a rabbit or squirrel to put on the dinner table.
As a kid growing up no one around our town was known to carry and handgun, not even Owen the night marshal, who was the only law we had. Owen's duty was to faithfully go in and check to see if any lights had been left on in the downtown stores and maybe remember to set the latch on the doors on his way out. And know this was not Mayberry R.F.D. It was a typical own in Iowa and not thank God New York where they had to have a Sullivan Law to keep evil doers from doing it with a hand gun. And nationally, thanks to Al Capone and friend and enemies in of the roaring twenties, a National Firearms Act made it illegal for average citizens to own a submachine gun like the Tommy gun that got known as the "Chicago Piano."
Gun enthusiast totally immersed in the gun culture may say that the current decay within our culture is a reason why everyone with any sense ought to go packing and ready to use a gun. But such a contention is just a symptom of this gun culture that is part and parcel of the increasing violence. It is a self-fluffing prophesy. Like fish that know nothing of water, those totally immersed within this gun culture know nothing of its damaging impact on the very life members would supposedly blast away in protection of themselves and other innocents. Without their gun they would feel like a fish out of water.
Ah, but one is to not even to be permitted to recognize and say how dangerous this particular subculture is. Much like at Penn State where silence was a sacred duty and is still religiously practiced by the most faithful and shame on others for not supporting the Penn State football culture.
And of course the most devout members of that and any such culture believe themselves to be the most virtuous of all. Heroically so, like members of the Samurai culture in Japan that in World War II would Bonsai charge to death in place of ever surrendering, if somehow capture would suicidal disembowel themselves in Hari-kari, and as a lone Kamikaze pilot take many foreign devils with him by flying his bomb fashioned plane in the biggest ship he could find.
Thank God I am not as blind as a bat when it comes to these troublesome mini-cultures that develop and I am certainly willing to blast that stupid football culture at Penn State. However not my Alma matter that is a model of what can be done when your heart is in the right place---GO HAWEYES. I see no reason for anyone to ever remind anyone that Iowa got thrown out of the Big Ten in 1930 over the development of a corrupt football culture which must have just been fabricated and spread by those elitists from Yale that the Hawkeyes had beaten a few years before. Did I say Go Hawkeyes and if I were not at all of the homes games to see them play smash-mouth football I would feel like a fish out of water.
I am a life long gun owner and believer in the right to own guns (by any qualified, law-abiding citizen).
However, I agree with both sides in some of their arguments.
It is a fact that if no guns were present this incident would not have occurred.
It is also a fact that another person carrying a gun could possibly have prevented many of the deaths/injuries that occurred here.
This scenario is also a distinct PROBABILITY:
One Person starts shooting everyone around him/her, another person shoots the original shooter, someone else, not knowing who started the shooting, shoots the second shooter, and so on until it has escalated into an avalanche of shooters reacting. There would definitely be far more casualties than in this instance.
The moral of my comment is that, since there obviously are NO absolute solutions to this controversy, that instead of infighting we should be having civil and sincere debates to find the most workable solution.
The simple fact is, politicians USE people. Selfish attitudes are easily manipulated. Whether it is guns, religion, gender, race/color, or just simple partisan affiliation.
What so many people don't want to recognize are simple facts like:
When the elite politicians have finally gained complete control they can, and will, take away any and all rights the people have long enjoyed. That includes the 2nd amendment, separation of church and state, right to vote, and more.
In other words WE the people will have, once again, subverted ourselves to the very tyranny our forefathers escaped from.
Please try to remember,These founders gave us the greatest people-controlled, democratic nation in history.
Lets try not to allow the political elite to manipulate our thoughts and actions thereby destroying the most precious thing God/mother nature has given us "the ability and right to think for ourselves"
Most people would naturally assume that they were in immediate danger from anyone they saw holding or shooting a gun in this situation, just like all those who tried to getaway and/or died trying to protect others.
That's exactly how it should be, especially for those right-wing state's rights advocates that hate the federal government, but just look at what the NRA gun nutz did when D.C. passed their version of gun control.
Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Gun Ban
June 27, 2008
In a historic 5-4 decision Thursday, the Supreme Court declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right -- not a collective or militia right -- to keep and bear firearms for self-defense.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202422582170&slreturn=20120622102352
But the landmark ruling, which placed bitter divisions on the Court on full display, is likely to mark the beginning, not the end, of litigation over Second Amendment rights as gun owners and local governments test the contours of the right enunciated by the Court.
Your true character exudes from your every comment
LOL!
About 200 people die every week from shootouts by domestic terrorist.
Obama and his followers demand that 60 million legal, law abiding gun owning citizens surrender their guns.
The Irony.