That morning, 20 students had been killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and like the rest of the nation, the president was shaken by the news. Even if Congress had taken the lead, it may not have been in a position to pass any meaningful gun control legislation. And as Murphy notes, there wasn’t a robust, well-funded contingent of gun control advocates to counter the National Rifle Association’s inevitable pushback in that immediate, post-Sandy Hook moment. “You are starting to figure out that you’ve got an enormous imbalance of political power,” Murphy says of watching the gun debate unfold after the Sandy Hook tragedy. Family members of the Sandy Hook victims had gone to Capitol Hill that morning and then to the White House, thus they had a bird’s-eye view of the failure.

Source: Huffington Post July 05, 2017 09:47 UTC