Setting a course for gun control

President Obama’s gun-violence task force this week met with gun-control and gun-rights advocates, mental health experts, and video game industry representatives, as it sought to quickly forge sweeping new gun-control legislation before outrage over the Newtown, Conn., school massacre fades. The task force, headed by Vice President Joe Biden, was created in the wake of the slaying of 20 first-graders by a gunman armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle. Sources say it’s considering a renewed ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, universal background checks for all gun purchasers, a national database for the sale and movement of firearms, strengthening mental health checks, and sterner penalties for carrying guns near schools. Legislation may be submitted in just a few weeks.

Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman who was critically wounded in a shooting in Tucson in January 2011, unveiled a fundraising campaign this week to counter the influence of the National Rifle Association. Gun-rights activists, meanwhile, said they would celebrate “Gun Appreciation Day” on Jan. 19.

The task force’s meeting with the NRA this week was merely “a political maneuver,” said Frank Miniter in Forbes.com. Obama wants to say he spoke to all sides before dropping an “anti-gun-rights salvo on Congress.” But lawmakers won’t embrace one-sided solutions that erode Americans’ cherished Second Amendment freedoms. Obama is “poised to overreach” on gun control—and doomed to fail.

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No one is trying to take away everyone’s guns, said Andrew Rosenthal in NYTimes.com.The measures under consideration contain “not a single Second Amendment restriction,” with no curbs on the legal ownership of firearms. In fact, from a liberal standpoint “these recommendations don’t go far enough.” We have to halt the proliferation of weapons designed to slaughter lots of people, whether it be by new taxes, tougher restrictions, or outright bans.

Liberals can dream of a gun-free future, said Jeffrey Goldberg in TheAtlantic.com. But unless a “giant magnet appears over the continental U.S.” and sucks up the 300 million guns already legally in circulation, “not too much will change.” That’s why Americans must retain the legal right to arm themselves against criminals and dangerously ill people with “fairly easy access to weaponry.”