ABC News: Obama Big Talk, 'Little' Action on Guns Since Sandy Hook

December 14, 2016, marks four years since the heinous attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, and ABC News is using the day to draw attention to how President Obama’s emphasis on gun control has largely been coupled with failure to secure any new gun laws.

The Sandy Hook attack was carried out by a gunman who stole his firearms, killed his own mother with one of the weapons, and thereafter, went to the school and killed 26 innocents. Democrats seized on the attack as an opportunity to pass gun control. They pressed for universal background checks in Manchin/Toomey, and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) pushed an “assault weapons” ban. Obama supported both measures, yet both went down in flames. This was largely because neither action would have stopped another Sandy Hook attack.

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), after whom the gun control in Manchin/Toomey was named, admitted his bill would not have prevented the attack, and because Sandy Hook Elementary was a gun-free zone, the fact that an AR-15 was used was not as important as the location in which the attack occurred. In other words, the gunman had more than nine minutes inside the school without armed resistance. In that setting, with that amount of time, even a gunman armed with a rudimentary firearm, such as a revolver, could have caused unimaginable havoc.

Sandy Hook Parent Nicole Hockley, now co-founder of the gun control group Sandy Hook Promise, lamented the inability to pass universal background checks after the tragedy. She said that “in theory,” those checks were “the easiest legislation to pass,” yet they could not be secured. Nonetheless, she gives Obama, Manchin, and others “an ‘A’ for effort.”

ABC News is not passing out As for effort. Rather, the news outlet suggests Obama talked a lot about gun control and did not deliver. It reports, “Yet for all the words, Obama has made little federal progress toward what he has repeatedly described as “common-sense gun laws.” It is, the outgoing president has acknowledged, one of the biggest regrets of his time in the White House.

It is crucial to remember that the key reason for Obama’s defeat in this area is that he and his fellow Democrats were pushing gun control that would not have prevented another Sandy Hook.

Paris, for example, has the kinds of laws Obama wanted–universal background checks and bans on entire categories of firearms. Yet it also had 130 innocents gunned down in cold blood on November 13, 2015.

California has universal background checks and strict limitations on “assault weapons,” yet it also had 14 innocents shot and killed in the December 2, 2015, San Bernardino attack.

Washington state has universal background checks, as well, yet it had a mass shooting in a Burlington mall on September 23, 2016.

The bottom line is that gun control laws empower criminals and terrorists while placing law-abiding citizens in an indefensible position. The American people know this, which is why they have rejected the gun control push by Obama and his fellow Democrats.