Obama backs bid to ban assault weapons

US: President Barack Obama Tuesday backed a new bid to revive an assault weapons ban and other new gun laws, as traumatized US politicians wrestled with the aftermath of a sickening school massacre.

Obama also called an ardently pro-gun senator who has shifted his position on firearms laws since Friday’s carnage in Connecticut and has begun meeting top cabinet officials to consider his options, his spokesman Jay Carney said.

The killings of 26 people, including 20 children, at a Newtown elementary school sent the country into shock, and may have shifted the political debate on firearms in US society, after years of gun lobby ascendancy.

Carney said that Obama is “actively supportive” of an effort by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein to write a bill early next year to reintroduce a ban on deadly assault weapons that expired in 2004.

Several leading Republican senators, while shocked by the school massacre and accepting something had to be done, were not ready to commit this early to specific anti-gun legislation or to rule out gun ownership altogether.

Senator John McCain, asked about tighter controls on assault weapons, said:”I think we need to have a conversation about all aspects of this tragedy to see that it doesn’t happen again.’ But Republican Senator Lindsey Graham argued that reinstituting an assault weapons ban might “give a false sense of security.”

“I don’t know what the government can do when you have somebody this disturbed.

AFP