The president got to work late on December 14, 2012. With just seventeen days to go until the country fell off what pundits were calling the fiscal cliff, Obama had spent the previous evening meeting with John Boehner at the White House, trying to hammer out a deal. The House Speaker had brought Mike Sommers, his chief of staff, and Brett Loper, his policy director; Obama had Tim Geithner and Rob Nabors, his top liaison to Capitol Hill, join the others for the session in the Oval Office.1 There was a decided undertone of urgency: without an agreement, a severe combination of spending cuts and tax increases that were intended to reduce the nation’s deficit were set to go into effect, and the resulting economic fallout might be devastating—even if it would radically fix the federal budget. Boehner had offered to allow an additional $800 billion in revenue—that is, tax increases—but he wanted $1 trillion in cuts to entitlement spending. Obama’s revenue target was $1.4 trillion, and he was willing to cut $600 billion from entitlement programs. Concession by concession, the two sides made progress, but Boehner was scheduled to fly home to Ohio the next day, a sign that the talks still weren’t close to a final resolution. Aides to both Boehner and Obama later told reporters the meeting had been “frank,” that peculiar bit of Washington-speak meaning “not very productive.”
Obama, who usually arrives in his West Wing office around 9 a.m., did not show up until 10:30 the next morning for his daily briefing, the intelligence report essentially prepared nightly by the CIA that fills him in on world conditions, especially in the hot spots.2 This particular morning, the presentation he got wasn’t the one his security advisors had prepared the night before. Almost an hour before he showed up that Friday morning, at 9:35 a.m., an emergency dispatcher in Newtown, Connecticut, had answered a call from Sandy Hook Elementary School.
John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism official, was the first to notify the president, around 10:30 a.m. As reports swirled over the number of victims and the circumstances of their deaths, the White House dropped everything to monitor the situation second by second. By the time the final, horrifying details came in, the president was deeply affected. The carnage inflicted by Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old former Sandy Hook student who had shot his way into the school, was almost incomprehensible.3 Twenty-eight people had died, including six teachers, Lanza’s mother, and the shooter himself.
What left Obama deeply shaken, though, were the other twenty victims. They were all first-grade students.
One was Noah Pozner, a smiley six-year-old with close-cropped brown hair who already knew how to read. He used words like “dynamic” and “DNA,” his mother told a newspaper a few days later. He was so enamored of tacos that he told his mom he wanted to manage a taco factory when he grew up, in between stints as an astronaut and a doctor. He wanted to know whether God existed, and who had created God. Lanza had shot Noah Pozner eleven times. Noah was too young to have owned a tie; a family friend would buy a small one to put on the boy at his funeral.4
The unspeakable evil that tore apart Sandy Hook Elementary was even more tragic for the fact that it wasn’t an isolated incident. Since he’d become president, Barack Obama had heard briefings on at least eighteen shootings that killed more than one person. Some were so shocking that they dominated headlines for weeks, even months: Jared Lee Loughner murdering six people and wounding more than a dozen, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson; medical student James Holmes, armed with multiple weapons and covered in body armor, unleashing a barrage into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, that killed twelve people who had stayed up late to get a sneak peek at the newest Batman movie; army major Nidal Malik Hassan, a psychiatrist who was supposed to be helping military personnel who came through Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen soldiers; Amy Bishop, a biology professor denied tenure at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, opening fire during a faculty meeting and killing three of her colleagues.
For every mass murder that stayed in the headlines for days on end and spurred calls for change, there were two or three that went almost completely overlooked. Two weeks after Holmes murdered moviegoers in Aurora, Wade Michael Page shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Six months before Hassan’s rampage at Fort Hood, a software engineer in Santa Clara murdered his two children, their aunt and uncle, and their eleven-month-old cousin. The same day, a forty-five-year-old murdered eight people and wounded two more at a nursing home in Carthage, North Carolina, where his estranged wife worked. Those incidents occurred less than three weeks after a gunman killed ten people, among them family members and random bystanders, in a shooting spree that spanned two towns in southern Alabama.
A coffee shop in Seattle. An immigration center in Binghamton, New York. A Christian college in Oakland, California. An IHOP in Carson City, Nevada. A beer distributorship in Manchester, Connecticut. All were scenes of mass shootings since Obama had taken office in 2009.5 In Obama’s own hometown, gun violence was becoming even worse; on December 28, 2012, an alleged gang member named Nathaniel T. Jackson became the 500th person murdered in a single calendar year.6
And the horror in Newtown wasn’t even the first high-profile shooting that month. On December 1, 2012, a football player for the Kansas City Chiefs, Jovan Belcher, murdered his girlfriend, then shot himself, outside the team’s stadium. On December 11, a twenty-two-year-old wearing a hockey mask fired a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle—the same brand of rifle Lanza would use three days later—to shoot innocent bystanders at the Clackamas Town Center, a mall on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. He killed two people.
But Obama couldn’t get over the children who had died in Connecticut. He couldn’t get over their names, and the fact that just a few years earlier, his daughters had been in first grade.
“I know there’s not a parent in America who does not feel the same overwhelming grief that I do. The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of five and ten years old,” Obama said in the White House briefing room later that day. His voice nearly cracked as he raised his left hand to his eye, to wipe something away. Then he paused, for thirteen long seconds, as he tried to collect himself. “They had their entire lives ahead of them—birthdays, weddings, kids of their own.”7
He wiped his left eye three more times, his right eye twice more in the course of a four-minute statement. He paused to collect himself three long, painful times.
It was, with the single exception of his announcement that his grandmother had died, shortly before the 2008 election, the most profoundly emotional, profoundly human moment Barack Obama had ever shared with the nation. And that emotion—outrage, anger, grief—would have an impact on Obama’s legislative agenda. “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” he said.8
Through the weekend that followed, the White House made its first real effort to come up with legislation that they believed would curb gun violence. It embraced a proposal from Senator Dianne Feinstein that would reinstate the assault weapons ban, the measure that had sent so many Democrats to defeat in 1994. It would support closing a loophole that allowed guns purchased at firearms shows to change hands without the background check that would otherwise be required. And it contemplated legislation that would ban high-capacity ammunition clips like the type Lanza had brandished at the elementary school.
Obama tapped Joe Biden to head the new gun control initiative. A working group Biden headed began the new year by considering expanding universal background checks for gun purchasers, tracking sales of firearms through a national database, and strengthening mental health checks that could lead to new restrictions on gun purchases. The vast majority of Americans, up to 80 or 90 percent in some cases, backed those proposals. There was no way, the White House believed, that Republicans in Congress would be able to withstand public pressure to tighten even the least controversial rules. These were little kids, after all, who were mowed down with a weapon that was simply too easy to access.
In an earlier generation, the politics of gun legislation wouldn’t have worked. Forget the Republicans in the House, who would certainly have voted to block any new restrictions on guns; even the Democrats hadn’t been lockstep in favor of new gun legislation.
But with Sandy Hook, something had changed, or so the White House wanted to believe. Senator Joe Manchin, a pro-gun West Virginia Democrat who had aired a television commercial that showed him literally shooting a copy of cap-and-trade legislation with a rifle, said he was open to regulating military-style rifles like the Bushmaster Lanza had used in Connecticut.9 Fellow senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who had won election as an archconservative in the 2010 wave but who would need more moderate voters to keep his seat in 2016, joined with Manchin to come up with a bill—an almost heretical act for a Republican politician.
For the first time in two decades, the politics of gun control were working against the National Rifle Association. The pro-gun organization didn’t help its cause when Wayne LaPierre, its longtime executive vice president, offered a full-throated defense of existing gun laws at a Washington press conference a week after the Newtown tragedy. LaPierre pinned the blame on violent video games, violent movies, the media, and even gun-free zones at schools, while proposing new funding to put armed police officers in every school, a program the NRA called the National School Shield Program.10
Gun control advocates weren’t prepared for the new attention. After all, they hadn’t had a real foothold in the political process since Bill Clinton’s first term in office.
It’s hard to understate the fear the NRA had long inspired among Democratic elected officials. In the 1994 elections, two dozen Democrats who had supported the assault weapons ban had lost their seats in Congress after the NRA spent millions attacking their votes; Bill Clinton publicly blamed the NRA (and the vote on the gun bill) for ousting so many longtime Democrats. In fact, he believed Democrats could have held Congress had it not been for the ban.
Thereafter the Democratic Party developed a serious phobia about discussing guns. Banished to the minority in the House, Democrats believed their only path back to a majority ran through places like suburban Texas and rural Washington State, places where traditionally conservative Democratic voters had begun casting Republican ballots. For these voters—white, nonurban sportsmen who hunted for sport and food—guns were a way of life, and the Democratic Party seemed precariously out of touch.
Though Clinton still touted the assault weapons ban, Democrats in the late 1990s began to change their tune. The 1996 Democratic Party platform acknowledged both the ban and its political cost, with an important caveat that would become a de facto line among even progressive Democrats: “We oppose efforts to restrict weapons used for legitimate sporting purposes, and we are proud that not one hunter or sportsman was forced to change guns because of the assault weapons ban. But we know that the military-style guns we banned have no place on America’s streets, and we are proud of the courageous Democrats who defied the gun lobby and sacrificed their seats in Congress to make America safer,” the platform read.11
The 2000 platform pledged to keep guns off streets and out of schools “in ways that respect the rights of hunters, sportsmen, and legitimate gun owners.”12 In 2004, John Kerry was photographed hunting geese in Ohio just two weeks before Election Day. He told reporters he and his three companions had each bagged a goose, with blood from one of the birds still staining his hands.13
The Democrats who led the Senate in the early years of the Bush administration either supported the NRA or understood the political risks of opposing it too vigorously. Tom Daschle didn’t advance any gun legislation when he served as Senate majority leader; his deputy, Harry Reid, who didn’t support extending the assault weapons ban in 2004, even found ways to kill gun control measures when they popped up inside his own party.*
Many politicians may have wanted stronger gun control laws, but they also wanted to keep their jobs. For almost two decades, the conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill held that the NRA’s power was virtually unlimited—and so was unchallenged by gun control advocates. Gun rights groups gave more than $30 million to supportive politicians between 1989 and 2012, and spent another $41 million on independent advertisements advocating their cause, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. (Gun control backers gave less than $2 million to their favored candidates in the same time period.) The NRA accounted for the lion’s share, $46 million, of that $71 million total,14 and the organization became so powerful it even began playing in some Democratic primaries. The group spent money to successfully launch the career of gun control opponent Michael Michaud, a rural Democrat who won a six-way primary in Maine’s Second District in 2002. It also waded into the fight between John Dingell and Lynn Rivers, a member-versus-member primary brought on when Michigan lost a congressional seat in 2002. Dingell, a longtime NRA backer and former member of its board of directors, beat Rivers, a liberal who supported gun control.
For Obama’s part, ever since his “cling” comment during the 2008 primaries, he had been careful not to appear as hostile to those for whom guns were a way of life. One moment, in his second debate against Mitt Romney, stood as a clear example of his hesitancy to embrace the issue. Asked about his 2008 promise to keep assault weapons out of criminals’ hands, Obama started his response by defending the Second Amendment to the Constitution: “We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves,” Obama said, before returning to the mass shootings that had occurred during his presidency.15 Obama was well aware, when starting off his gun answer that way, that the wrong gun answer could cause him problems in pro-gun blue states. Ironically, one thing Obama didn’t tout but could have was the fact that arguably, no Democratic president had expanded gun rights more in the past fifty years than Obama had, when in 2009 he signed a key piece of legislation into law that included an amendment allowing guns to be carried in national parks. It wasn’t an amendment Obama supported, but it was tacked onto a credit card bill that the president desperately wanted enacted, and so he signed it without complaining.
It was a poll-driven message: Obama’s strategists, in both 2008 and 2012, were worried about alienating voters in Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, swing states in which gun culture still reigned supreme. Even after earlier mass shootings, Obama had avoided supporting what the White House saw as an unwinnable cause. Following the shootings in Tucson, he called for civility in politics, not gun control. After the murderous rampage in Aurora, he preached healing rather than gun control.
But an elementary school in peaceful Newtown, Connecticut, was a bridge too far. A few days after the shootings, an intern working in the White House correspondence office was surprised when the president walked in unannounced. He wanted to read letters Americans had sent him about the Sandy Hook shootings. Obama spent more than an hour sitting in the White House mail room, poring over the letters, digesting the anger and anguish the shootings had inspired in his constituents.
His own pain spurred Obama to pursue an option he hadn’t tried during his first term: instead of pushing modest measures he believed he could get through Congress, Obama decided to vigorously advocate for gun control, though it would be a challenge to pass a bill reflecting his concerns through a narrowly divided Senate, much less a Republican-controlled House. But the anger the public felt demanded that their leader feel the same and actually try to lead. Obama would pursue what his strategists believed would be a losing cause—this was a rare decision by Obama, and the president embraced it with gusto, as if he’d been liberated and transported back to the time when he’d been a first-time candidate and could hope for anything.
Despite the odds, through the winter and spring of 2013 Obama and his allies on Capitol Hill worked diligently to put together a package that might pass the Senate. In the end, it was far from what gun control advocates had hoped for, but suddenly they had allies in the White House, an almost historic first step. Then Manchin and Toomey crafted the bill that would have expanded background checks for gun buyers and closed the so-called gun show loophole.
At one point, Manchin believed he had convinced the National Rifle Association to stay on the sidelines; the country’s largest gun rights organization wouldn’t support the bill, but it wouldn’t actively oppose it, either. Manchin was surprised and angry when the NRA came out against the bill. It turns out, unbeknownst to Manchin, there was a partisan struggle inside the NRA, where the more partisan board members wanted to fight Obama at every turn on this, while others on the NRA board argued that they would lose their bipartisan credentials if they didn’t let pro-gun Democrats do something after Newtown. What gave the NRA its power was bipartisan influence; the more moderate forces inside the NRA feared that if they snubbed a longtime ally like Manchin, they could see all of the Democratic allies buck them, and suddenly the NRA would be vulnerable anytime Democrats ruled both Congress and the presidency. One reason gun control went nowhere in the first two years of the Obama presidency when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was that the NRA had allies like Manchin and even Harry Reid.
Aides to members of Congress were frustrated, too, by the White House’s lack of outreach; Obama called Manchin, often a swing vote on critical legislation, for the first time after the Newtown shootings, more than two years after he had won his Senate seat. Digest that for a minute. Two years. A Democrat. Then again, Manchin wasn’t alone; Obama didn’t call many senators, period.
The NRA’s opposition was enough to convince members of Congress—mostly Republicans, but with a handful of red-state Democrats thrown in—to vote against the overwhelming will of the American people. On April 17, just four months after the disaster at Newtown, 46 senators voted to block the Manchin-Toomey compromise, enough to effectively kill the bill. Two women sitting in the Senate gallery, which was packed with relatives of victims of the shootings in Newtown and Tucson, couldn’t contain themselves. “Shame on you!” they shouted, before being escorted from the chamber.16
Only two Republicans, Toomey and Mark Kirk of Illinois, voted for the measure. Four Democrats voted against the bill. (Reid was actually a fifth no vote, but as majority leader, if he hoped to bring the bill back to the floor for another vote, he had to do this as a procedural maneuver.) The bill won 54 votes—with Reid’s switch, that meant it was 5 short of the 60-vote margin it needed to reach a straight up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.
At the White House, Obama was incensed. Just hours after the Senate voted, Obama joined families of victims in a Rose Garden press conference to decry the results.
“I’m going to speak plainly and honestly about what’s happened here because the American people are trying to figure out how can something have 90 percent support and yet not happen,” Obama said. “Even the NRA used to support expanded background checks. The current leader of the NRA used to support these background checks. So while this compromise didn’t contain everything I wanted or everything that these families wanted, it did represent progress. It represented moderation and common sense. That’s why 90 percent of the American people supported it.
“It came down to politics—the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections. They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti–Second Amendment. And obviously, a lot of Republicans had that fear, but Democrats had that fear, too. And so they caved to the pressure, and they started looking for an excuse—any excuse—to vote ‘no,’ ” Obama went on.
The anger Obama felt boiled over. “All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” he said in the Rose Garden that day. It would become a more common refrain: the fight, he promised, “is not over.”17
But the truth was that there had never been much hope of passing any kind of new gun laws in the first place. For one thing, Republican control of the House of Representatives meant John Boehner would have never had to bring a bill up; discharge petitions, which require a majority of the House to force a vote on a bill, have been sidelined as a tool of legislative action.
This was one of those odder moments in Washington, when the president and senators made a huge issue of a Senate vote that wouldn’t even see a vote in the Republican House. Of course, what the White House said after all this was that at least it had tried. And that is something that was different about this incident: for the first time since he took office, the president actually was willing to publicly fight a losing battle, to forcefully spend political capital, something many pols don’t do. But he didn’t have a very well laid-out plan as to how he was going to get this done. Basically, the strategy was to use his platform and position to focus the public guilt; but behind the scenes, there was no horse-trading, and Washington’s focus moved on.
Obama himself stopped fighting for gun law changes almost completely. And when asked about it, he sounds resigned that he’s powerless, as he did more than a year after his high-profile loss in the Senate. During a Q&A on Tumblr, the president went off when asked about yet another series of mass shootings post-Newtown: “The country has to do some soul-searching on this. This is becoming the norm. Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced developed country on earth that would put up with this.” He then pointed the finger at Congress and the NRA. “Most members of Congress are terrified of the NRA. The only thing that is going to change is public opinion. If public opinion does not demand change in Congress, it will not change.
“The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people. It’s not the only country that has psychosis,” he said. “And yet we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyone else. Well, what’s the difference? The difference is that these guys can stack up a bunch of ammunition in their houses, and that’s sort of par for the course.”
But other than those comments on Tumblr, the president has not attempted to rally the country again on the gun issue; he hasn’t toured his hometown of Chicago, trying to help rally that city to figure out how to quell the gang violence that has led to so many shootings in that city. These nonactions on guns, this public declaration that his presidency is powerless on this issue, are things the 2007 and 2008 version of Obama would be highly critical of. Just another indication of how Washington’s scar tissue has changed him.