President Barack Obama approached his second term with a bold proposal on Jan. 16 calling for increased provisions on the spread and use of guns. Obama’s proposal, which follows the Dec. 17 school shootings in Newtown, CT and an advisory panel led by Vice President Joe Biden, has been highly polarizing thus far.
Opposition to the proposal has been exhibited by House and Senate Republicans, among them Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz, a freshman senator and Tea Party favorite, said on a Jan. 20 episode of Meet the Press that “If you’re talking to a single woman living in Anacostia who has the misfortune to live next to a crack house, to tell her she doesn’t have a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, I think, is fundamentally wrong.”
Cruz also sympathized with a controversial advertisement from the National Rifle Association. The NRA ad called the president a hypocrite for allowing armed guards to present at his daughters’ school while not advocating for the presence of armed guards in public schools.
Supporters of the President have included New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg,
Most gun owners are opposed to the President’s initiative. “I don’t feel like [an assault weapons ban] is going to fix anything,” said junior Nick Hoffmann, a gun owner and active participant on the St. Paul Academy and Summit School clay target shooting team. “What has been done with AR-15s – the weapon used in the [Newtown] school shootings – could more or less be accomplished with any other weapon.”
Hoffmann’s opinion aligns with those who believe the root of the problem is not the guns: “The weapons are powerful, but the problem is first and foremost a few of the people using them,” Hoffmann said.