President Obama on the Shooting in San Bernardino

It also voted down a bill expanding background checks to more gun purchases. And now we have the attack Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed at least 14 people.

But while the tragic events may fail to surprise foreigners – one group lists 355 “mass shootings” in the US since the beginning of 2015, according to its definitions – they were viewed with heartache and given wide coverage in Britain, a country that effectively banned handguns in the 90s following a mass shooting at an elementary school in Scotland. Given that the perpetrators appear to have been a married Muslim couple, the hysteria factor will only be magnified.

After a briefing from his national security team, Obama asked the American people and “legislatures” to find a way to make “it a little harder” for people to get guns.

The evolving situation has forced Republican leaders and presidential candidates to contort themselves: talking tough on terrorism, yet ignoring the fact that the two were armed to the teeth with two.223-caliber assault rifles and two 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistols, and hundreds of rounds, all purchased legally.

If we were ever going to consider doing something about gun violence, you’d have to think that San Bernardino would be the starting point. That’s not how fear works in America. Wisdom comes later, if at all. “And he certainly believes that members of Congress should have the same impulse”.

“A focus on preventing people who are on the no-fly list or the terrorist watch list from being able to obtain weapons, obviously a huge hole in our background check system”, Baldwin said. Another bill in that could be revived would require background checks on those in that buy ammunition to ensure they don’t seem to be felons disqualified from owning guns.

The news conference will be held at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.

“This is the most common-sense [bill] supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans and a majority of law-abiding gun owners in America…” The NRA likes to create that impression. Colorado Springs, Savannah, Charleston?

That’s a sign of hope. A few months ago, before a mass shooting in Oregon, Quinnipiac released national poll results on a variety issues, including guns. Demographics are another factor.

The voices of this crowd tend to be drowned out by those who can only scream about the Second Amendment and by those who ignore the complicated nature of enacting stronger protections.

Gun control or mental health reform.

We need to stand, across party lines and beyond the knee-jerk rhetoric of the gun lobby, for a real conversation about the future of this country. But that’s half a solution. These are guns devised not for hunting deer in the forest, but only for killing other human beings in war zones.

The White House has focused its deliberations on an executive action that would detail who should be considered a high-volume gun dealer, a move that could expand background checks to a huge number of sales at gun shows, online, and elsewhere that now fall outside the law. But we can’t ignore the wide availability of guns, and the need to keep them out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable. That’s a tall order to construct. Adam Lanza and his mother needed less privacy about his mental health and the arsenal they kept in their home.

How do we know whom to incarcerate, when and for how long?

Whatever the motive or mental state of the killer, guns are the weapon of choice, especially ones that can kill many people quickly.