President Obama finally talked favorably about further gun control legislation yesterday.
The president nodded to the post-Aurora outcry for stronger gun legislation, adding that “too often, those efforts are defeated by politics and by lobbying, and eventually by the pull of our collective attention elsewhere. But what I said in the wake of [the 2011 shooting spree in] Tucson was that we were going to stay on this persistently.” [...]
He then went on to articulate what seems to be an opposition to legal assault rifles: “I, like most Americans, believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms. I think we recognize the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation… but I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals; that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.”
I don't agree that the 2nd Amendment "guarantees an individual citizen the right to bear arms" any more than I believe that African Americans are two-thirds of a person -- another archaic and extinct line in the Constitution. But I like the fact that the president is finally stepping up his game on this issue.