President Barack Obama on Wednesday heads West in a new push for stricter gun laws, with fears mounting that legislation will collapse due to treacherous politics and the power of the firearms lobby.
A week after declaring America should be ashamed if it has already forgotten vows for action after the Newtown school massacre in December, Obama headed to Colorado to line up public opinion behind his push for reforms.
Earlier White House hopes of enacting a new assault weapons ban and curbs on high capacity magazine clips are now fading, so the centerpiece of Obama’s efforts is likely to be a bid to expand background checks for gun owners.
But even that fallback plan appears under threat in Congress, where Republicans as well as Obama’s Democrats face tough re-election races next year in heartland states where gun culture runs strong.
Obama will visit Denver Police Academy to push what the White House says is “common sense” reform, and will be just a few miles from the scene of a mass shooting in a movie theater in Aurora last year which killed 12 people.
One of the president’s top aides admitted Wednesday that some in Washington were getting “cold feet” on gun reform, despite national polls showing 90 percent of Americans favor stronger background checks.
“Washington tends to be a lagging indicator of public opinion,” Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer said, adding that he remained confident that stronger gun legislation would emerge from the aftermath of Newtown.
“What the president wants to sign is the strongest gun bill he can sign,” Pfeiffer told a breakfast meeting hosted by the Politico news organization.
“We have to make sure that whatever we do is better than current law. We are going to look at any compromise that comes forward.”
Some Republicans, who feel any new laws would infringe on the constitutional right to bear arms, warn they will filibuster legislation expected to be brought up in the Senate after Congress returns from a recess next week.
But it is not just Obama’s Republican foes who are standing in the way of change — some on his own side are also in a tough spot.
Several Democratic senators, like Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina, face difficult political choices that could trap them between their president and conservative constituencies.
Obama chose Colorado partly because the Rocky Mountain state, where the frontier mentality remains strong, has enacted new legislation designed to curb gun violence.
Lawmakers in the state, which Obama won on the way to re-election in November, have passed new gun laws requiring expanded background checks and limits on the size of magazines for assault weapons.
Opponents of expanding federal background checks argue that they would involve a government registry of firearms which may be unconstitutional.
They also fear that such a scheme would make it tough for family members to hand guns down through generations, or would prove prohibitive in rural areas where people may live many miles from gun stores used to process checks.
The top gun lobby group, the National Rifle Association (NRA) argues that guns are not the problem.
An NRA task force released a report Tuesday calling for more armed guards in US schools, following the Newtown killing in which 20 children and six educators were gunned down.
The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, who had earlier shot and killed his mother, cut down his victims with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a matter of minutes before turning a handgun on himself, investigators say.
Obama, who led mourning in a nation traumatized by the Newtown killings, will travel back to Connecticut on Monday to build public pressure on members of Congress before they report back to work.
Last week, Obama, infuriated by signs his gun push was foundering, delivered a powerful call for reform, surrounded at the White House by mothers who had lost kids to gun violence.
“Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten,” he said.
After visiting Colorado, Obama will make an overnight stop in California, where he will take part in several fundraising events for his Democratic Party, with mid-term elections already looming in 2014.
Obama heads West to keep guns campaign alive
