WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's push for tighter gun controls faced defeat after getting blocked in the Senate, while the president, surrounded by shooting victims and families of victims, said the powerful gun control lobby “willfully lied” to the American people. “All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” the president said Wednesday evening. “Who are we here to represent?” After giving little attention to the always sensitive issue of gun control during his first term, Obama made it a top priority for his second after a string of mass shootings capped by the December attack at a Connecticut school that left 20 young children dead. At the time, Obama called the attack the worst day of his presidency. The failed measure was the result of a rare bipartisan effort by a handful of senators who put together a proposal to tighten background checks for gun buyers — a gun-related issue on which polls say a majority of Americans agree. The Senate voted 54-46 in favor, but that was well short of the 60-vote supermajority now commonly needed to advance most legislation. The defeat in the Senate was especially stinging because the chamber is controlled by Obama's own Democratic Party. Aware of Americans' passions for the constitutional right to bear firearms, key supporters of stricter gun controls had made an effort to show that they, too, were gun owners and had no intention — despite the NRA's warnings — of taking away guns that were purchased lawfully. The Obama administration even circulated a photo of the president firing a gun while skeet shooting at Camp David. Families of victims of the Connecticut shootings joined Obama on several occasions and lobbied lawmakers on their own in Washington. “Our hearts are broken,” Mark Barden, who lost his 7-year-old son, Daniel, in the Connecticut shooting, said after Wednesday's vote. “Our spirit is not.” An attempt to ban assault-style rifles failed as well, along with a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines, although those measures had been all but abandoned already. Some senators said afterward that they had not wanted to meet with the mothers and fathers of the dead, or said it was difficult to look at photographs that the parents carried of their young children. “I think that in some cases, the president has used them as props, and that disappoints me,” Sen. Rand Paul said before the vote. Obama later responded to such criticism: “Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don't have a right to weigh in on this issue?” the president said. Some of those parents watched as the gun measure died in the Senate on Wednesday, along with relatives of victims from other recent mass shootings. Forty-one Republicans and five Democrats sided together Wednesday to kill the background checks proposal. It would have required background checks for all transactions at gun shows and online. Currently the checks, designed to prevent criminals and the seriously mentally ill from purchasing firearms, are mandated only for sales handled by licensed gun dealers. Opponents of the restrictions — which would have been the most meaningful gun curbs approved by Congress in two decades — said the curbs were defeated because they wouldn't have worked. Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe said most proposals were “predicated on one assumption that somehow we think that the criminal element will single out this one law to comply with.” The NRA told lawmakers it intended to keep track of how the votes were cast and consider them in making decisions about whom to support in the midterm elections for Congress next year. Even before the vote began it was apparent that the bill was in trouble, with a growing number of senators saying they would vote against the measure. — AP
