In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, President Obama vowed an expeditious crackdown on gun violence.
Then he appointed Vice President Joe Biden to head a panel to study the problem and formulate recommendations that will . . . yawn . . . prevent “more tragedies” . . . double yawn . . . and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
Uh, Mr. President . . . would you be good enough to hurry things along just a bit?
Because those high-volume-of-fire, military-style rifles won’t get any safer all by themselves while Joe Biden struggles to bestir himself.
True enough, no quick fixes are possible.
There are almost as many firearms in America as there are people — and the Supreme Court has twice in the past four years said that the Second Amendment affirms the right of most Americans to own guns for personal defense.
That does not, however, mean that the nation is powerless to at least try before the fact to defend itself from mass murderers with military-style weapons.
It’s true that the AR-15 Bushmaster rifle used at Sandy Hook was not an automatic weapon. But that’s a pointless distinction given the 30-round magazines used by the murderer; all 26 victims died in a high-volume hail of fire that would have been impossible to sustain with a conventional hunting rifle.
So there’s a start — controlling, if not eliminating, large-capacity magazines.
It would, of course, be useful if both sides of the debate dialed down the rhetoric.
There is no way even so-called “assault” rifles are going to be taken out of circulation in America — that would be politically impossible, and there are too many of them anyway.
So demanding an outright ban pointlessly compromises the debate.
At the same time, the National Rifle Association’s obdurate refusal to consider controls of any sort is cause for despair.
NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre on Friday offered his solution — ban violent video games and put armed guards in schools, but do nothing else of significance.
That’s not going to cut it — America was sickened to its soul by the Sandy Hook massacre, and it’s in no mood for nonsense of the sort LaPierre is peddling.
We understand that there is no way the NRA can justify the ready availability of weapons like the AR-15, which doubtless explains LaPierre’s equivocations.
And that’s an opening for Obama.
Committed, forceful leadership aimed at forcing gun advocates to make a case for militarized “sporting” rifles is what’s needed.
No convincing case can be made — and pushing the point would be the first step in disarming the gun lobby.