Photograph by Steven Lane/The Columbian/AP Photo

An armed security guard at an elementary school.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who favors new gun-control laws, will speak at the National Press Club today about the status of gun legislation in the House. Former Rep. Asa Hutchinson, an Arkansas Republican, will unveil the National Rifle Association’s “School Shield” program, which recommends placing armed guards in schools.

President Barack Obama will host Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore at the White House, with Lee heading to Foggy Bottom later to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry will also meet with South Korea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Yun Byung-Se to discuss security in the Korean peninsula.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim will discuss the organization’s efforts to eliminate extreme poverty in an appearance at Georgetown University. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde will discuss risk, economic growth and poverty reduction at a World Resources Institute event.

“42,” a film about baseball legend Jackie Robinson, debuts at the White House today, with Michelle Obama hosting 80 high school and college students for a workshop with the film’s cast and crew, including actor Harrison Ford. Later, President Obama will host a private screening of the movie.

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who acknowledged an extramarital affair four years ago, faces a runoff in the Republican primary against former Charleston County Council member Curtis Bostic.

Original post is Washington Daybook: Dueling Agendas by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images

The King College Prep band plays as the hearse carrying the body of Hadiya Pendleton arrives at Cedar Park Cemetery in Riverdale, Illinois, on February 9, 2013.

The tragedy of the narrative is breathtaking.

The pragmatism of the political calculation is sobering:

Hadiya Pendleton, 15, performed with her Chicago high school band at President Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration.

She was gunned down in Chicago a week later.

First Lady Michelle Obama attended the girl’s funeral.

The girl’s parents attended the president’s State of the Union address last week, seated alongside the first lady as the president closed with an appeal to the joint session of Congress to at least vote on the gun-safety measures before them — in honor of  Pendleton, the 20 children killed by a gunman in Newtown, Connecticut, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and many other victims of gun violence.

Now Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, the girl’s mother, appears in a TV ad sponsored by Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

The mother recalls her daughter’s inaugural parade appearance as “the happiest day of her life.”

As Congress debates the nation’s gun laws, she says in the mayors’ newest ad, Congress can start with background checks for all gun purchases “so no more innocent children are killed and no parent has to go through this heartbreak.”

Of course, universal gun background checks for legal gun purchases won’t ensure that no more innocent children are killed. Yet the additional measures that Congress could consider, such as a ban on assault-styled weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, appear mired in the politics of the Second Amendment and pressure of the gun lobby, lacking the votes needed in either chamber of Congress.

The mayors’ campaign, which includes as co-chairman New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News, has focused on the families who have suffered — an earlier ad featuring the mother of a girl killed in the Tuscon shootings that seriously wounded Giffords, another featuring several parents saying, “Enough is enough.”

In pressing for background checks, the mayors may also be confronting the politics of the possible.

As Bloomberg’s Heidi Przybyla reported,  “a coalition of House Republicans is willing to thwart the National Rifle Association’s opposition to broadening background checks for U.S. gun purchases. That may be Obama’s best chance for advancing tougher gun regulations this year.”

Original post is Mayors Take Aim at the Possible: Background Checks for Gun-Buyers by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

A Fairfax County police officer at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Virginia.

Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association spokesman who proposes arming the guards of the nation’s schools in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, will call on Congress tomorrow to lay a “blanket of security” with a School Shield Program.

“We joined the nation in sorrow over the tragedy that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut,” LaPierre plans to say, according to a copy of his testimony released by the NRA today. “There is nothing more precious than our children. We have no more sacred duty than to protect our children and keep them safe. ”

The executive vice president of the organization representing gun owners and manufacturers plans a more measured appeal than the initial remarks he made in Washington a week after the massacre of 20 first-grade schoolchildren and six educators in Connecticut. There is less railing against the media in his prepared remarks, more pointed defense of a few notions: Background checks for gun-owners are not a universal solution, because criminals don’t get those checks, and semi-automatic weapons like the Bushmaster carried into Sandy Oak Elementary School have been around for 100 years. It’s not the guns, he maintains, it’s the people carrying them who are a threat.

“It’s time to throw an immediate blanket of security around our children,” he plans to say at a congressional hearing on what the nation should do about gun violence tomorrow. “About a third of our schools have armed security already – because it works. And that number is growing. Right now, state officials, local authorities and school districts in all 50 states are considering their own plans to protect children in their schools.”

“In addition,” he will say, “we need to enforce the thousands of gun laws that are currently on the books. Prosecuting criminals who misuse firearms works. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a dramatic collapse in federal gun prosecutions in recent years. Overall in 2011, federal weapons prosecutions per capita were down 35 percent from their peak in the previous administration. That means violent felons, gang members and the mentally ill who possess firearms are not being prosecuted. And that’s unacceptable.”

“I think we can also agree that our mental health system is broken. We need to look at the full range of mental health issues, from early detection and treatment, to civil commitment laws, to privacy laws that needlessly prevent mental health records from being included in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.”

“We need to be honest about what works and what does not work,” he will say. “Proposals that would only serve to burden the law-abiding have failed in the past and will fail in the future. Semi-automatic firearms have been around for over 100 years.  They are among the most popular guns made for hunting, target shooting and self-defense. Despite this fact, Congress banned the manufacture and sale of hundreds of semi-automatic firearms and magazines from 1994 to 2004. Independent studies, including a study from the Clinton Justice Department, proved that ban had no impact on lowering crime.”

“And when it comes to the issue of background checks, let’s be honest – background checks will never be “universal” – because criminals will never submit to them.

“But there are things that can be done and we ask you to join with us,” LaPierre will say– “the immediate protection for all, not just some, of our school children, swift, certain prosecution of criminals with guns and fixing our broken mental health system.

“We love our families and our country.  We believe in our freedom,” the NRA leader will say. “We’re the millions of Americans from all walks of life who take responsibility for our own safety and protection as a God-given, fundamental right. ”

Original post is NRA: Schools Need ‘Security Blanket’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by George Frey/Bloomberg

A man talks on a cell phone while carrying a semi-automatic assault rifle he is trying to sell at the Rocky Mountain Gun Show in Sandy, Utah, on Jan. 5, 2013.

That’s the percentage of Americans who say that President Barack Obama’s proposals to curb gun violence are “about right,” according to the Pew Research Center.

That’s a plurality position in the survey taken Jan. 17-20. Thirty-one percent of respondents, including a majority of Republicans, said Obama’s gun proposals “go too far,” while 13 percent said his proposals don’t go far enough. The remaining 17 percent didn’t answer the question or said they didn’t know.

Obama announced 23 executive actions on Jan. 16 to reduce gun violence, including some that are designed to streamline access to government data for background checks. The president also wants Congress to ban high-capacity magazines and semiautomatic assault-style weapons. A 1994 ban on certain types of assault-style weapons expired in 2004.

The Pew survey underscores how Americans are divided on how to curb gun violence, more than a month after a shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, killed 20 elementary school students and six staff members.

Any proposals to restrict gun ownership will be opposed by the National Rifle Association and are unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled House. New regulations on gun ownership face an uncertain future in the Senate, which includes some members from the Democratic majority who are up for re-election in rural states with large populations of gun-owners.

“Decades of congressional inaction on gun-control measures suggests Obama’s agenda could easily be undercut,” Bloomberg News reporters Heidi Przybyla and Lisa Lerer wrote on Jan. 17.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 39 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Scott J. Ferrell/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

Maryland Attorney General Joseph Curran shakes Jim Brady’s hand outside the U.S. Supreme Court during a news conference on filing a law brief. Brady was injured when John Hinckley, Jr. attacked President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

One year ago, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the oldest gun-control advocacy groups, began reinventing itself with a focus on public education. It hired a new president, a New York advertising executive with no background in politics, ordered up web videos featuring celebrities and eased out its vice president who literally wrote the book on American gun policy.

Then came Newtown.

The Dec. 14 massacre of 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school horrified and transfixed the nation, undercutting the need for a public message campaign on gun violence. It also spurred, for the first time in more than a decade, a serious discussion about federal policy and legislation.

On the pro-gun side of the debate, the National Rifle Association, established in 1871, has spent years preparing for and warning of such a showdown with a singular message: No new gun restrictions. Their adversaries, meanwhile, are caught without a clear playbook as Brady is transitioning and newer groups are just beginning to take form.

“I worry, broadly, how are we going to get everyone to work together?” said Sarah Brady, whose husband, James Brady, the former Ronald Reagan press secretary shot during the 1981 assassination attempt on the president, is the group’s namesake. “We’ve got to. We can’t all be doing the same thing. We need to divvy up tasks, otherwise the whole thing could lose momentum.”

Original post is Sarah Brady’s Gun Control Worry: Getting All to ‘Work Together’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Barrett Stinson/The Grand Island Independent/AP Photo

One of two police officers carrying an AR-15 assault rifle stands guard at the west entrance of Grand Island Senior High School, in Grand Island, Neb.

Updated at 12:10 pm EST

The White House scolded the National Rifle Association today for an ad calling the president an “elitist hypocrite” on gun control because his children have armed protection.

Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, called the ad “repugnant and cowardly.”

“Most Americans agree that a president’s children should not be used as pawns in a political fight,” Carney said in a statement. “But to go so far as to make the safety of the president’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly.”

On the day that President Barack Obama announced a sweeping agenda of 23 executive actions and more congressional proposals to curb gun violence, the NRA, which is proposing armed guards at the nation’s schools as an alternative, has released a video-ad calling the president an “elitist hypocrite” because his children are protected.

The narrator of the ad, appearing at the NRA Web-site and on the Sportsman Channel, does not identify the president’s two school-age daughters by name, but does ask this:

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours? Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools, when his kids are protected by armed guards at their schools?”

Obama’s children attend the private Sidwell Friends school in Washington, yet it is not the school that provides their primary protection. The family of the president is protected by the Secret Service. The girls have been spotted in such venues as trick or treating in Washington escorted by tall men with radios in their ears.

The ad, which closes with images of the assault weapons that the president proposed banning today at an announcement of his agenda at a White House annex, contends that Obama demands that the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, yet “he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security.”

In the aftermath of the shootings of 20 children and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre proposed armed guarding of all the nation’s schools. The only way to “stop bad guys with guns,” he said, is “good guys with guns.”

The NRA has suffered a certain loss of public approval in national opinion polls during the past month, while support for an assault weapons ban has increased in those surveys. The shooter in Newtown used a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle with oversized ammo clips to riddle with bullets the first graders slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As Obama and Vice President Joe Biden launch a campaign for gun control today, the gun lobby is mounting its own media assault: Sportsman Channel and the NRA “are bringing the NRA’s popular talk-radio show NRANEWS Cam & Co. to television every weekday live from 5-6pm ET beginning Jan. 15,” the organization announced. “Hosted by Cam Edwards, and airing live from the NRANEWS Studios in Washington, D.C., NRANEWS Cam & Co. will be the one and only news-talk series on television that can authoritatively address the issues that are vital to America’s more than 80 million sportsmen and sportswomen. ”

Like the assault weapons ban.

The weapons pictured in the NRA ad about the president’s children, closing with: `Protection for their kids, and gun-free zones for ours.”

Robert Gibbs, a former press secretary for Obama, called the NRA ad “disgusting” today in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” It is the sort of ad, he said, that political activists make in the middle of the night after some excessive drinking. Usually, he said, people arrive in the morning with a more sober eye and censor it.

Roger Runningen and Margaret Talev contributed. 

Original post is White House Scolds NRA for Ad Challenging Obama Over Children by Political Capital.

Photograph by Danny Wilcox Frazier/Redux

An NRA supporter in Des Moines.

That’s the percentage of House members who received funding from the National Rifle Association’s political committee in their most recent race, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

The NRA, which has 4 million members, probably will oppose a package of proposals to curb gun violence that President Barack Obama is set to announce today.

One of the proposals is a ban on so-called assault weapons. While the proposal has public support — 58 percent back an assault weapons ban, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll conducted Jan. 10-13 — the Republican-controlled House is unlikely to approve it.

“Reinstating an expired 1994 assault-weapons ban, administration officials have indicated, will be among the most difficult to pass, given opposition from gun-rights groups and their allies on Capitol Hill,” Bloomberg’s Lisa Lerer and Heidi Przybyla wrote yesterday.

The NRA supports a plan to put armed guards in schools. About 55 percent of people back that proposal, according to the Washington Post-ABC poll.

The New York legislature this week advanced a bill that would “toughen gun controls and make it easier to keep firearms from the mentally ill,” Bloomberg’s Freeman Klopott and William Selway reported.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 47 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ida Mae Astute/ABC via Getty Images

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically injured two years ago when a gunman opened fired in Tucson, Arizona, and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly talk to Diane Sawyer about the need for changes in gun control laws and greater awareness of mental health issues on Jan. 5, 2013 in New York City.

Two years after the Tucson, Arizona, shootings that critically injured former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, she and her husband are adding their voices to a movement for gun control.

Big-city mayors are marking the anniversary with a TV ad tailored for the Washington market and communities that have suffered mass shootings featuring the mother of a 9-year-old girl killed in the Tucson shootings.

“Enough,” Giffords says in an interview on  ABC”s “World News with Diane Sawyer” airing tonight.

“After the shooting in Tucson, there was talk about addressing some of these issues, [and] again after [a movie theater massacre in] Aurora,” Colorado, her husband Mark Kelly, the astronaut, says in an interview also following the Dec. 14 killings of 20 young schoolchildren and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut. “I’m hopeful that this time is different, and I think it is. Twenty first-graders’ being murdered in their classrooms is a very personal thing for everybody.”

Gifffords and Kelly visited Newtown to meet with families of the victims.

The “first couple that we spoke to, the dad took out his cell phone and showed us a picture of his daughter and I just about lost it, just by looking at the picture,” Kelly says in the interview, excerpts released by ABC. “It was just very tough and it brought back a lot of memories about what that was like for us some two years ago.”

Giffords and Kelly are proposing “common sense” changes through “Americans for Responsible Solutions.”  They propose a comprehensive background check for the private sale of firearms and controls on large magazines of ammunition.

Jared Loughner, the accused shooter in Tucson, used a magazine with 33 rounds. Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter who also  killed his mother and himself, used numerous 30-round magazines in a Bushmaster AR-15.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns today released a new TV ad featuring Roxanna Green, mother of Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old killed in Tucson. It opens with a scene from the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. In the ad, Green demands that elected officials in Washington take immediate action to curb gun violence in America.

“I have one question for our political leaders,” Green says in the ad. “When will you find the courage to stand up to the gun lobby?  Whose child has to die next?”

The ad is airing on Washington, DC, cable through Jan. 14, the group says, and in markets where there have been mass shootings:  Tucson, Waco, Texas, Roanoke, Denver, Binghamton, N.Y., and Milwaukee.

“How many more children must die before Washington does something to end our gun violence problem?” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chair of the mayors’ group and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, says in a statement accompanying the ad’s release.

“Roxanna Green knows all too well the pain of losing a loved one gun violence – sadly, there are parents and siblings and friends who learn this every day in our country,” says co-chair Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston. “It’s time for Washington to act to reduce gun violence — for the 33 Americans that are killed every day and for all of our children.”

President Barack Obama has charged Vice President Joe Biden with assembling an agenda for legislative action following the Newtown shootings, asking for those goals by the end of this month.

The National Rifle Association has proposed stationing an armed guard at every school.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president, urging Congress after the Newtown shootings  “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”

“I bought a gun at Walmart recently and I went through a background check,” Kelly says in the ABC interview. “”Why can’t we just do that and make it more difficult for criminals and the mentally ill to get guns?”

Giffords has undergone a long and arduous recovery aided by physical therapy, speech therapy and yoga. She has been able to ride a horse and is preparing for a tandem bicycle ride with her husband, a space shuttle pilot. She plans to apply the same resolve toward the mission of gun control, Kelly says. “Gabby works very hard in her rehab,” he says. “Now we intend to work very hard on this new project.”

Original post is Tucson Two Years Later, Newtown: `Whose Child Has to Die Next?’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Whitney Curtis/Getty Images

A display during the NRA Annual Meetings and Exhibits on April 14, 2012 at America's Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

That’s how much the National Rifle Association’s political action committee and individuals employed by the association gave to federal candidates during the 2012 elections.

Republicans received $634,146, or 88 percent, and Democrats got $85,450, or 12 percent, according to the data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group that analyzes political giving.

Republicans won 234 of the 435 House seats, or 54 percent, in the Nov. 6 election. The party will hold 45 of 100 seats in the Senate starting Jan. 3, when the 113th Congress is set to begin.

The NRA has “called for stationing police officers in schools as the proper response” to the Dec. 14 shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, Bloomberg News reporters Jonathan D. Salant and John Hechinger wrote Dec. 21.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: $719,596 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Candice Towell/Getty Images

National Rifle Association (NRA) President Charlton Heston holds up a rifle during his address at the 131st NRA convention at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Nevada, in this April 27, 2002 file photo.

Wayne LaPierre was channeling Charlton Heston today.

LaPierre, the longtime executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, issued a defiant speech today in Washington with the NRA’s answer to the schoolhouse shootings that felled 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, a week ago: Arm the nation’s school guards.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said LaPierre, urging Congress “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”

The answer to gun violence, the NRA suggests, is more guns.

“On the same day families lay three more children to rest in Newtown, the National Rifle Association wrongly called for increasing the number of guns around vulnerable children,” said Rep. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “The NRA says they want armed guards in our schools.”

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat who lost her husband in a mass shooting on the Long Island Railroad in 1993, said she was “saddened” by LaPierre’s speech: “The NRA’s leadership had an opportunity to help unite the nation behind efforts to reduce gun violence and avert massacres like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School but it instead showed a disconnect between it and the majority of the American people.”

It was 12 years ago, during another presidential campaign year, when then-NRA President Charlton Heston, the actor, warned that the organization was under attack. Al Gore “is going to smear you as the enemy,” Heston said at the NRA annual convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 20, 2000. “He will slander you as gun-toting, knuckle-dragging, bloodthirsty maniacs who stand in the way of a safer America. Will you remain silent? I will not remain silent.”

Today, LaPierre was sounding a similar call to arms. He spoke of Americans as a modern-day militia.

“Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blue steel, something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms,” Heston said, recalling farmers who rose to fight at Concord. “When ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument, that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty.”

Holding a shotgun in his right hand and then above his head, and naming Gore again, the old actor voiced an old refrain: “From my cold, dead hands.”

Jonathan Salant contributed to this report. 

Original post is NRA’s `Cold, Dead Hands:’ 2012 by Political Capital.