President Obama is Angry About the Gun Bill

Filed in National by on April 17, 2013

President Obama spoke some hours back on the failure of the gun bill to pass the Senate. He’s clearly angry and he’s quite right that this is a shameful moment for a Government that is supposed to represent us. If you haven’t seen his remarks, this is the video from TPM (they seem edited, to me):

Please Mr. President — be mad at these idiots and start campaigning against this minority now.

EDIT: TPM points out that Mitch McConnell posted this on his Facebook page after the vote:

Perhaps it is time to link up the #gunfail effort to this.

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"You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas." -Shirley Chisholm

Comments (15)

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  1. Jason330 says:

    The tone was right. I hope he keeps it up. The GOP and those craven Dems that fear the NRA are in dire need of an ass-kicking at the polls.

  2. SussexAnon says:

    Yawn.

    If Obama would have spent the last 5 years pointing out how full of crap the GOP was instead of trying to negotiate with them we would be in a better place now. All Obama has now is hollow rhetoric.

    2016 can’t get here soon enough. I look forward to a democratic president with some balls.

    Go Hillary.

  3. cassandra_m says:

    The Ds that voted against it were Baucus, Begich, Heitcamp, Pryor.

  4. cassandra_m says:

    Will Bunch speaks for me:

    How many murders would be prevented by better background checks? It’s hard to say — they may have deterred the shooters at Virginia Tech and in Aurora, for example — but there’s no way you can argue it would be less than the three who died senselessly in Boston on Monday. You and I would move heaven and earth to bring those people back, but 46 cowards in Washington could not lift their now-blood-stained finger to save more lives than that, at no cost to anyone’s rights. After the vote today, Patricia Maisch — the woman who stopped Tucson killer Jared Loughner’s killing spree — shouted on the Senate floor, “Shame on you!”

  5. puck says:

    What happened to Obama’s usual strategy of making the bill more Republican until it passes?

  6. Jason330 says:

    Still can’t get my head around this vote. I’m not sure what is more shocking. That this has failed, or that buying guns online without background checks has been legal all along.

  7. TC says:

    Even as a gun owner myself, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am at the inability to pass even the simplest of measures. Perhaps it’s time to lobby for amending the Constitution instead.

  8. puck says:

    Obama is going about this all wrong. He should define mass shootings as terrorism and wrap up the assault weapons ban and background checks into an anti-terrorism bill.

  9. socialistic ben says:

    im not comfortable using the specter of terrorism to get this done. While I agree with you, to the extent that people live in “terror” of an idiot with an AK, it isn’t necessarily an organized conspiracy to go shoot people…. at least as far as the gun suppliers working WITH the killers. We have to go through x-rays because of “terrorism”, we have to throw people in jail for possessing a few joints because of “terrorism”, we should be wary of Mexicans, because they might actually be terrorists…. you get the idea.
    This is finally FINALLY the Obama I’ve wanted to see all along. Some have asked what i want out of him when it comes to fighting the repukes….. This. The vote was defeated, but he called them out on their game and their lies.

  10. socialistic ben says:

    “2016 can’t get here soon enough. I look forward to a democratic president with some balls. ”

    I believe they are called “Thatchers”

  11. cassandra_m says:

    What happened to Obama’s usual strategy of making the bill more Republican until it passes?

    This is how you know that puck is pretty much just looking for theater here. If he was at all familiar with this bipartisan bit of business he would know that it was already weak tea.

  12. puck says:

    You have to admit it is a departure. In previous major filibusters, Obama has been secretly on the side of defeat anyway. This seems different.

  13. Dave says:

    If Gun Free Zones don’t work, why does the Senate feel the need to have one?

    Perhaps if our Senators felt the same vulnerability ordinary citizens face, they would understand how nearly 90% of the nation felt.

  14. cnapier says:

    The spectrum of terrorism is already part of this issue (although on the terrorist side). There are Al Qaeda videos telling would be terrorists to buy guns at gun shows in America because they won’t even have to show id. And the NRA successfully lobbied against including chemical tags in gunpowder which would have aided in the Boston terror attack investigation.

  15. cassandra_m says:

    From the New Yorker: How Background Checks Died

    It was always going to be hard to get a gun-control measure through Congress, even one as popular as background checks. So it wasn’t just the vote to block Toomey-Manchin that was so disheartening—that a minority of the Senate, representing a minority of Americans, was able to vote down legislation that had been so watered-down as to make it utterly unobjectionable. It wasn’t just that the Republican-controlled House would never have passed the bill, even if there had been sixty votes for background checks in the Senate. It was watching the whole process, realizing again so vividly and on an issue that matters so much, that the people who make the laws for three hundred million people are often cowards or fools or both.