President Obama on Wednesday gave Vice President Joe Biden Jr. a month to complete a job that he could have finished that afternoon. It is time to come up with, as Mr. Obama put it, “a set of concrete proposals” to make the nation safer from guns. The ways to do this are well-known because the nation has grappled with gun massacres many times before. It is Congress that hasn’t.
For years sensible gun-control bills have been offered and rejected. The occasional bill has actually become law — but in hollow, loophole-riddled form — and then been allowed to lapse. Farther-reaching proposals focusing on things like banning certain kinds of bullets, or taxing them out of existence, have been laughed at.
Many of the good ideas, some expressed on this page this week, involve sensible limits on who can buy guns and how they can be sold. Mr. Obama should also focus on the weaponry itself, starting with restoring — after toughening — the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004. Assault weapons are versions of military rifles that are meant to kill people, not paper targets, clay pigeons or deer. They account for only a fraction of the guns sold and used in the United States, but they play a hugely outsize role in the national slaughter; rampage killers love them.
The expired ban was shredded with loopholes, which gun dealers easily exploited. The rifle Adam Lanza carried in Newtown, Conn., a semiautomatic Bushmaster, was a version of the AR-15, a widely popular form of the military’s M-16 and M-4. But it was not illegal, even in Connecticut, which outlaws assault weapons, because it differed from banned weapons in cosmetic details, not in lethality. A revived assault-weapons bill should have stricter definitions to capture more of these lethal weapons than before. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who sponsored the original ban, has promised to reintroduce it early in the new year. In the House, Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a Democrat of New York, has a bill containing what should be an element of any law Mr. Obama proposes: a ban on magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. High-capacity magazines allow someone to commit mass murder in seconds, or minutes, without the inconvenience of having to reload.
Republicans say they want to end the violence but have been mostly trying to end the discussion. Their attempts at deflection began immediately after news of Newtown spread. To hear them tell it, the slaughter of 20 children and seven adults wasn’t about guns; it was about mental health care. It was Hollywood and video games and the culture of violence. Actually, it was about guns and bullets and the easy access to them.
The Republicans and the gun lobby have rabidly opposed any and all gun restrictions, even those that don’t impinge on Second Amendment rights. In the 1990s, for example, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York introduced a bill to levy a 10,000 percent tax on hollow-tipped bullets, the kind designed to tear flesh. (The man who killed Ms. McCarthy’s husband and wounded her son on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993 carried dozens of them.) Nothing came of it.
Congress remains is mired in excuses and passivity — an assault-weapons ban is a nonstarter, Republicans say, because assault weapon is a vague term. “How do you define assault weapon?” Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican of Alabama, asked Politico, saying a ban wouldn’t fix anything. “We’ve seen that movie before,” he said. What that answer ignores is that definitions are possible, but the gun lobby and its supporters, mostly in Mr. Shelby’s party, pepper them with exemptions to make them less effective and to keep the gun-making business nice and healthy.
Mr. Obama played into that argument on Wednesday, talking about the “culture that all too often glorifies guns and violence” and saying that any actions should begin “inside the home and inside our hearts.” It is tempting to blame abstractions, and to give in to fatalism, knowing that America is a land of hundreds of millions of guns and of a rabid, well-financed lobby that shrouds its unreason in appeals to individual liberty and freedom from government.
But the path to sanity needs to start somewhere. If Mr. Obama is serious, he already knows what to do.
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