Trying to “grade” President Obama’s first hundred days with respect to gun violence prevention is like grading a student who has registered for class, done a good job with preparations, but has put off attendance and test-taking to the next semester.

Over the last 100 days, the nation has suffered a string of mass shootings taking the lives of 57 people in less than a month – including seven police officers, thirteen aspiring citizens and eight senior citizens (not to mention the other approximately 3,100 murdered by gunfire since January 20 whose deaths didn’t make national news).

We have also learned that a large percentage of the firearms traced at crime scenes in Mexico come from the United States, including military-style assault weapons used to murder police and innocent bystanders in Mexico’s drug war. The nation also marked the somber anniversaries of the Virginia Tech massacre (two years ago) and the Columbine school shooting (10 years ago).

The President’s direct response to this gun violence – a public safety and public health issue more lethal than pistachios, spinach or peanut butter crackers – has been minimal.

On the one hand, the President has appointed people with strong records on gun violence prevention to his cabinet and Administration, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel.

The White House Web site continues to show the President’s commitment to requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales at gun shows, childproofing guns, making crime gun trace data accessible so law enforcement can fight the illegal arms trade, and permanently banning military-style assault weapons.

The President sent “thoughts and prayers” to the victims in Binghamton on April 3. In his April 16 news conference in Mexico, he said that we need to deal “with assault weapons that… are helping fuel extraordinary violence” and that “tracing of bullets and ballistics and gun information” needed to be accessible to law enforcement.

The Obama Interior Department wisely decided not to appeal our lawsuit to block the last-minute Bush Administration rule allowing loaded, concealed guns into our national parks.

On the other hand, the gun violence prevention movement is disappointed that – in the face of a problem that takes the lives of over 30,000 Americans a year, an average of 84 Americans a day, including 32 by homicide, and injures another 70,000 each year – that the Administration is not doing more now to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people.

The President should strongly support the bill introduced last week to require Brady criminal background checks for all gun purchases – something that should not concern any legitimate gun owner, but something that would make it harder for dangerous people to get guns easily.

The President should oppose efforts to permit almost anyone to have .50-caliber sniper rifles and military-style assault weapons, particularly in our nation’s capital.

The President should make it clear that efforts to disrupt trafficking in illegal guns and stockpiling of private arsenals are not a threat to law-abiding gun owners.

While the Obama Administration has been unwilling so far to be tested on popular gun violence prevention policies – over 80% of Americans favor criminal background checks for all gun sales, including at gun shows, with solid majorities in favor of banning military-style assault weapons – we are optimistic that in the coming months the White House will take common sense steps to reduce the staggering toll that gun violence takes every day on American communities.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

Mass killings in the United States are not inevitable.

If they would have the political courage to create a safety net of gun violence prevention laws, America’s elected officials could help keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people and thus reduce the total number of killed and wounded by gunfire every year in this country.

Let’s be clear:  mass shootings are symptoms of a vastly larger gun violence problem in America that we enable by our inaction and inattention.  Our nation suffers over 30,000 gun deaths every year, including 12,000 firearm homicides.  That’s 32 gun murders a day – the same number murdered at Virginia Tech two years ago on April 16.

To understand how complacent we’ve become with a death toll that shocks the rest of the industrialized world, consider that England and Wales suffered just 52 gun murders total in the last reported year, according to the UK’s Home Office.  Yet here in America, mass shootings alone accounted for 57 firearm homicides in less than a month between March 10 and April 7.

At an average of 32 firearm homicides a day, that means another 871 gun murders went virtually unnoticed by the national, and often local, news media over that month.

If terrorists or pirates or even pistachios had killed even a fraction of that number of Americans last month, news coverage would be wall-to-wall, spurring citizens across the political spectrum to demand immediate action from President Obama and Congress.

As it stands, Americans murdering each other at this rate is largely ignored until a deranged person shoots and kills several Americans at the same time.  Even then, most news coverage reacts like they do to a natural disaster that comes and goes and can’t be controlled.

Most of what we hear from the politicians are pro forma words of sympathy, empty platitudes and weak promises to “enforce the laws on the books.”  Aside from the Brady Law, there are only a few weak, nearly non-existent laws on the books to prevent gun violence, so the basic response is: do nothing.

Meanwhile, the killing continues at its usual pace.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Gun violence and mass killings are man-made problems that can be made less tragic with common sense answers immediately available to our elected officials. 

To be clear, gun violence prevention isn’t about any one gun law.  It’s about a system of nationwide laws that work together to reduce the total number of gun deaths and injuries by making it harder for dangerous people to get firearms, while respecting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.

America lacks such a system today.

To address this, Congress should require criminal background checks for every gun sale in this country, including at gun shows, where criminals and gangsters can get anything from AK-47’s to cheap semi-automatic pistols from unlicensed “private” sellers with no questions asked.

Next – as the shooting deaths of seven police officers over the last month bear tragic witness – Congress should restrict civilian access to military-style assault weapons.

Furthermore, Congress should limit the bulk sales of handguns and take other steps to disrupt the illegal firearms traffickers who supply the criminal gun market that plagues too many American communities.

These policies won’t end all lethal violence in America, but they are a necessary step.  With 30,000 Americans dead every year from gunfire, it is clear that doing nothing is not working.

(Note to readers: An edited version of this article appeared in last Friday’s edition of the Nashville Tennessean.  This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

Today’s Gallup news release, “Support for Gun-Control Laws at All-Time Lows”, is one of the most misleading I’ve seen in a long time.

Not only is the information old, but the main question asked and highlighted is not reflective of current efforts by activists around the country to reduce gun violence.

This polling information was collected last October, which Gallup does mention in its third paragraph. Yet it certainly begs the question: Why publish a statement based on data that is almost six months old, in the wake of a string of mass shootings committed over the past month?

The pressures of getting into the news cycle are powerful, but the important question is what Americans believe about gun violence prevention policy today.

What’s even more disturbing is for Gallup to ask Americans whether or not they support a total ban on handguns when that policy has not been pursued nationwide in years and totally ignores the current debate on gun violence prevention.

Since the Supreme Court decided last June that total handgun bans are unconstitutional, such policies are off the table as a policy option.  It makes no sense to ask Americans their opinion on a policy that cannot lawfully be enacted.

Asking this question last October – almost four months after the Supreme Court’s decision – was puzzling enough.  Repeating the same irrelevant polling results six months later in the wake of police officers being murdered with AK-47s is mystifying, and it is a distraction from public attitudes toward the mainstream of gun control policy today.

What Gallup should do in the future is try to replicate the polling results of other surveys that examine Americans’ attitudes toward the wide variety of gun violence prevention policies that, in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, are “presumptively lawful” after the Supreme Court’s decision, while gauging the desire of Americans to see those proposals enacted into law.

For example, the Brady Campaign commissioned a survey of 1,083 people who voted on Election Day last year to find out their attitudes on a handful of gun law proposals.  The results showed:

• 83% of voters support requiring background checks for all gun sales in this country;

• 68% support registration of gun sales and licensing of gun owners; and

• 65% support banning military-style assault weapons;

These wide majorities include McCain voters and gun owners who support these policies, as well.  (Not surprisingly, some of these results compare favorably to a CNN poll taken in June of last year.)

Over two-thirds of all voters said these policies should be adopted in the first year of the Obama Administration.

It seems that public support for gun control laws is as high as it ever was.

Lives are at stake in the gun violence prevention issue, where 100,000 Americans are killed or wounded every year by gunfire. It’s obvious that what we are doing now to reduce gun violence is not working.

In deciding how to address this problem, policymakers should be seeing relevant and current polling if they need some sense of what the public might be thinking now, not old data regarding out-dated questions.

UPDATE:  Gallup has changed the title of its release to “Before Recent Shootings, Gun-Control Support Was Fading,” though the release URL indicates the earlier version.

See also the Media Matters “County Fair” blog on the same issue from earlier today here.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

In Pittsburgh on Saturday, three police officers were murdered, reportedly by an assault-weapon wielding man shooting ‘hundreds of shots’ who apparently believed the gun lobby propaganda that an ‘Obama gun ban‘ would lead to his ‘rights being infringed upon.’

This was just a day after 13 were gunned down in Binghamton, New York by a murderer who reportedly ‘hated America and talked about assassinating the President‘ while his former co-workers felt that someday he might ‘come in mad one day and shoot people.’ These shootings were preceded by a month of shootings including eight shot dead in a North Carolina nursing home, five in a Santa Clara, California shooting, four police officers in Oakland and ten people in Alabama.

After each horrific shooting, some leaders in Washington have said the solution is to do nothing, simply continue to enforce the existing laws, just as we have been doing.  The gun lobby, meanwhile, calls for weakening our already paltry laws to get more guns to more people in more places. It is time for the gun lobby to stop stoking fear among gun owners with false claims about the government.  It is time for the gun industry to stop capitalizing on those ginned-up fears to spread weapons of war among the public.

The gun lobby’s rhetoric has consequences.  We have seen how profound those consequences can be.

We have a gun crisis in America.  As important as the economic crisis is, the right to be safe at home and work and play needs at least as much attention from our policymakers as the right to economic security. It is time for leaders in Washington to drop empty platitudes after each horrific shooting, and instead do what they’re paid to do: show backbone, and enact reasonable laws to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people.

At the very least, require Brady background checks for all gun sales; restrict military-style assault weapons to the military and law enforcement and help law enforcement crack down on corrupt gun sellers. 

What we’re doing now is not working.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

Today’s mass shooting in Binghamton is just the latest wakeup call reminding us that we must do something to stop the gun violence in our country.

In the past few weeks alone, in mass shootings, 10 were killed in Alabama, eight killed in a North Carolina nursing home, 10 killed in California, including four police officers, but the silence from many of our political leaders was deafening.

About 30,000 people a year in this country die from gun violence, about 80 a day, 32 by homicide – the same number who died at Virginia Tech two years ago this month.

In the space of four months, up to nine Americans died as a result of bacteria-laden peanut butter crackers, and the government quickly took action.

Some of the top government officials in our country say we don’t need to do anything different – that we should just ‘enforce the laws on the books.’  The laws on the books aren’t getting the job done.

Now is the time to take effective steps to prevent gun violence.

Our hearts go out to the victims and their families.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)