Obama: It's Time To "Do Something” About Guns

Flanked by police officers instead of children, President Obama campaigned for gun control in Minneapolis on Monday.

“We may not be able to prevent every massacre or random shooting. No law or set of laws can keep our children completely safe but if there’s even one thing we can do, if there’s just one life we can save, we’ve got an obligation to try,” Obama said at the Minneapolis Police Department’s Special Operations Center. “We don’t have to agree on everything to agree it’s time to do something. That’s my main message here today.”

While Obama urged Congress to institute a broad set of gun-control proposals, he made clear on Monday that the “vast majority” of Americans—including a majority of gun owners – “support criminal background checks on anyone trying to buy a gun.”

“That’s common sense,” he said. “There’s no reason we can’t get that done. That is not a liberal idea or a conservative idea. It’s not a Democratic or Republican idea. That is a smart idea. We want to keep those guns out of the hands of folks who shouldn’t have them.”

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Although President Obama is calling on Congress to reinstate a ban on ‘military-style assault weapons,’ the legislation faces an uphill battle in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Even Harry Reid is refusing to endorse such a ban—but he is supporting “expanding background checks to private gun sales at shows and other steps,” according to ABC.

Reid of Nevada is the top Senate Democrat, who sets the chamber’s legislative schedule. He said Sunday that he wants the Judiciary Committee to produce a bill that could be debated by the full Senate and would be open to proposed amendments by any senator.

However, Reid signaled that the committee version would lack the ban on assault-style weapons.

“If Dianne Feinstein, by the time it’s through the Judiciary Committee, if she doesn’t have her assault weapons, at least let her have an opportunity to offer this amendment” on the Senate floor, Reid told ABC.

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