Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Steven Dorantes, right, is comforted following a funeral mass for his brother Rey on Jan. 18, 2013 in Chicago. Rey Dorantes, 14, died after being shot six times while he was sitting on the front porch of his home while talking on the phone on Jan. 11. Dorantes’s murder was the 21st homicide recorded in Chicago for 2013, a city which saw more than 500 homicides in 2012.

Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel will hold a midday news conference today with the city’s police chief, Superintendent Garry McCarthy.

The two are almost certain to face questions about this month’s spiraling pace of murders in the nation’s third most populous city, including this week’s killing of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton a mile from President Barack Obama’s South Side home.

Pendleton was shot in the back and another student wounded by a gunman who sped away as they were taking shelter from the rain with other students. The volleyball player and band majorette had attended the president’s second-term inauguration in Washington last week.

As  Obama presses for measures aimed at curbing gun violence, the killings in his home town run by his former White House chief of staff threaten the mayor’s own political stature by undermining his city’s sense of security.

Read the full story on Chicago’s gun violence at Bloomberg.com.

Original post is Gun Violence in Obama’s Backyard: Chicago’s Problem is Emanuel’s by Political Capital.

Photograph by Olivier Douliery/Pool via Bloomberg

President Barack Obama attends a memorial service for victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting at Newtown High School in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 16, 2012.

The children’s first names were known to their kin, to those who named them.

And as President Barack Obama methodically spoke these names, his cadence was answered by the wailing cries of women from the auditorium’s front row, reserved for the family of the slain.

These notes of mourning seemed to understand, and amplify, the finality of a presidential roll call.

“Charlotte. Daniel. Olivia. Josephine. Anna. Dylan. Madeline. Beth. Chase. Jesse. James. Grace. Emilie. Jack. Noah. Caroline. Jessica. Benjamin. Avielle. Alison,” Obama said at the close of his remarks tonight in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were killed by a young gunman. Forty-one syllables representing 20 slain children.

“God has called them all,” Obama said. “To those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on.”

It was the crescendo to a speech that began with Obama quoting Cornithians. He then read the names of the six adults who died when a shooter, identified by police as Adam Lanza, 20, burst into Sandy Hook Elementary School and opened fire in two first-grade classrooms.

“Dawn Hocksprung and Mary Sherlach, Vicki Soto, Lauren Russeau, Rachel Davino and Anne Marie Murphy,” Obama said of the principal and four teachers and a counselor there. “They responded as we all hope we might respond in such terrifying circumstances, with courage and with love, giving their lives to protect the children in their care.”

Before the vigil, the president met privately with the families of the victims and with the emergency workers first to arrive at the scene of the massacre.

Meanwhile, the auditorium was filling up, with children long past the Santa age, clutching stuffed dogs that volunteers handed them outside. Others wrapped themselves in blankets from the Red Cross, huddling with their mothers or fathers after waiting in the cold.

The six boxes of tissues at the main entrance did not seem adequate for the mourning at hand. Burly firemen fought back tears. Infants fussed and cried, oblivious to the loss of the community that is welcoming them.

And as the president cited the heroism of the school staff and pledged to honor the spirit of the dead, he seemed to be questioning himself as much as he was challenging the country’s political institutions.

“I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days,” he said. “We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.”

“Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm,” he asked.

The answer hung in the auditorium of 950 seats.

“Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know they are loved and teaching them to love in return?” he prodded.

The president avoided any overt discussion of policy and he did not offer any specifics on the action — or if it would be legislative or administrative — that he would pursue.

But he hinted that action was to come.

“No single law, no set of laws, can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society,” he said. “But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.”

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Original post is Obama: `Surely We Can Do Better’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

President Barack Obama wipes his eye as he speaks about the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, in the briefing room of the White House in Washington.

Updated at 4:30 pm EST

We heard only a brief mention of politics today, as the president swept aside tears for the fallen children of Newtown, Connecticut.

That mention, made in passing during President Barack Obama’s statement in the West Wing following the fatal shootings of 26 people, including 20 children, at an elementary school today, included a call for governmental action.

The nation, Obama said in a televised appearance, will have to take some action against the carnage suffered too many times in too many communities — “regardless of politics.”

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” Obama said shortly after 3 pm EST today, hours after police were summoned by a 911 call from Sandy Hook Elementary School after 9:30 am.

“I know there is not a parent in America who does not feel the same overwhelming grief that I do,” the president said, speaking of the “beautiful little children between the ages of five and 10 years old” who died at that school today, then pausing and wiping tears from his eyes. “Our hearts are broken today, for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children.”

“Our hearts are broken for the parents of the survivors as well,” he said. “They know that their children’s innocence has been torn away from them far too early.”

“As a country, we have been through this too many times,” said Obama, who during his term has traveled to Arizona to console a community shocked by the shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others at a public appearance. “Whether it is an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children.”

Each time the news rings with random shootings — at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, this year, or at that mall in Happy Valley, Oregon, earlier this week  – talk of a political solution is stirred.

In a nation bearing repeated witness to community and schoolhouse shootings, each time, the politics of gun control are explained away as too difficult.

“We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” the president said at the White House today, “regardless of the  politics.”

This was a day for grieving and sympathy, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.

“There… will be,” he said, “a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I don’t think today is that day.”

Outside the White House later, as the winter sun started setting early, a small rally for gun control was taking shape, with some 50 people assembling on the street.

Alexandra Wilson, 28, arrived on her bike holding a sign written in red paint: “Enough is enough.”

“The press secretary said this isn’t the time to talk about it, but it’s the time to talk about it,” she said. “I’m here to show my support. I know we’ve got plenty of other problems, the fiscal cliff and everything, but we cant forget about this. It’s happening too much.”

Emma Fidel contributed from outside the White House.

Original post is Obama, Tearful: Action Needed — and a Gun Control Rally Assembles by Political Capital.