Former President Barack Obama told Oprah Winfrey during an interview on Tuesday, “gun violence is one of those issues where we are far away from the promised land.”
The Hollywood Reporter quoted Obama claiming we are short of the “promised land” because gun control has “become such a cultural hot-button issue.” He said:
It’s become wrapped up with people’s sense of identity and the degree to which the country’s divided and some of this is a big rural, urban split. It’s gotten very polarized. I think unwinding the polarization around that issue is going to take some time.
Obama lamented Democrats were unsuccessful in passing more gun control after the December 14, 2012, attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School.
He said he was “disgusted and appalled by the inaction,” adding “You had parents who just lost their children sitting in front of senators and asking them for very modest reasonable approaches. This wasn’t some radical agenda.”
The gun controls pushed in response to the Sandy Hook attack centered on universal background checks and an “assault weapons” ban, which included a ban on “high capacity” magazines as well.
Obama did not mention the gun used in the Sandy Hook attack was stolen, so no degree of point-of-sale-background-checks would have stopped it. He also did not mention the attacker had over nine minutes inside the school without any armed response.
With that much time on his side, the attacker could harm a multitude of people, regardless of the type of gun or size of magazine being used.
The review board that examined the April 17, 2016, shooting in which 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech found that a “high capacity” magazine ban would not have prevented that attack from occurring. The attacker used 15-round handgun magazines instead of those holding only ten rounds, but the board noted a 10-round limit “would have not made that much difference in the incident.”
Breitbart News reported concealed permit holders who were barred from carrying guns for self-defense on the gun-free Virginia Tech campus told the review board “they felt it was safer for responsible people to be armed so they could fight back in exactly the type of situation that occurred on April 16, 2007.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.