Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News
Mayor Michael Bloomberg looking over Daily News Assault Weapons Ban petitions sent in by readers Sunday.
Sometime this week we are supposed to see and hear about the recommendations that Joe Biden's task force has made to the President, recommendations the task force believes can assistance stop gun aggressiveness in this country.
When it happens, President Obama and his vice chairperson will be speaking directly to the parents and families and friends of the victims of Sandy Hook Elementary School. They will be speaking to Newtown. And the rest of us will begin to find out if they are really ready to do something more than offer huge talk and brave words and excellent intentions about guns in America, or if this administration will lead from behind on guns as it has for four years.
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CLICK HERE TO SIGN OUR ONLINE PETITION
So it is as if the President goes back to Newtown High School now, to the interfaith service held on the Sunday night after the shooting, with something more than tears and language and sadness this time, with a call to arms about an increasingly perilous arms race in this country that has nothing to do with the correct to bear arms.
Obama and Biden will not be addressing the gun nuts from the National Rifle Association, nor the tame members of Congress who live in cowardice of the NRA. They will not be talking to slick NRA lobbyists who notify they are defending the rights of gun owners when everything they are doing — everything they have ever done — is protecting the profits of gun manufacturers.
No. The President and vice chairperson — if they have a real and workable plan — will be talking to the parents of the children lost on Dec. 14, talking to the surviving brothers and sisters, talking to the surviving ancestral members of the adults who gave up their lives trying to save the lives of children, the real and lasting heroes of Sandy Hook Elementary.
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126,952 SIGN ON TO THE DAILY NEWS PETITION TO CURB GUN VIOLENCE
They are the only audience that should matter, they are the ones who must be persuaded, before the country and the rest of the world, that a moment to effect real mutation with guns in America will not be lost.
Because if Obama and Biden don't offer the "common-sense steps" that Obama spoke of on Monday at his news conference, then when do they?
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Or will this moment be lost forever, the way the moment was lost after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head and the 9-year-old granddaughter of Dallas Green, a fantastic old baseball man, was shot dead in Tucson, Ariz., the little girl there for a meet-and-greet with her congresswoman? Will this moment be lost the way the moment was lost after Aurora, Colo., and Virginia Tech?
"Our attention span is relatively limited," Mayor Bloomberg says Monday, standing in the Manhattan Room at City Hall.
Bloomberg is just back from Baltimore, from giving a powerful and eloquent opening address at Johns Hopkins, the summit there on reducing gun aggressiveness in America, which actually means gun deaths. Once more he called for background checks on everything gun sales, called for gun trafficking to be a federal crime, called for the government to limit military-assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
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He also called for the Justice Department to create a priority of prosecuting those who provide false information in places where background checks already do exist.
And, actually, Bloomberg was just getting going on this day. He continues to be the single most valuable voice for gun contain in the history of American politics, someone who has gone at the NRA in a way no elected official ever has and continues to recede at them, harder than ever after Newtown, constantly calling them out for existence the blowhards and bullies and false patriots that they are.
He has also called out the NRA for their greatest and most lasting lie, that they speak for everything gun owners, and that they are only protecting their Second Amendment rights, when what they are doing is giving a terrible name to responsible gun owners in America who want nothing to do with the NRA.
"This is not a constitutional question," Bloomberg said in Baltimore in the morning. "It's a question of political courage. The Supreme Court, the one that defines what the Constitution means and says, has ruled that reasonable regulation is consistent with the Second Amendment.
"So when the gun lobby raises the Second Amendment, it's nothing more than a red herring — and it's time for the Second Amendment defenders in Congress to call them on it."
Now Bloomberg is back from doing that, back in the Manhattan Room, and on a table in front of him are two bags' worth of signed petitions from readers of the Daily News, from among nearly 130,000 signed petitions in everything calling for an assault weapons ban, and for the kind of stricter gun contain Bloomberg has been demanding for years.
This is not some kind of contest for the readers of The News. It is a way to create their voices heard about guns in the aftermath of children existence shot dead the second Friday before Christmas in Newtown.
"We just have to continue to show (Congress) that the NRA isn't everything that powerful," Bloomberg says. He grins and adds this: "These are people who said they were going to do everything they possibly could to make Obama a one-term President. That's how powerful they actually are."
Of course, he has gone around the country and given money to candidates running against NRA-backed candidates and won, straight up. He has cohesive Mayors Against Illegal Guns. And delivered the kind of speech he gave at Johns Hopkins. The NRA can't outspend him and certainly can't scare him, and so he continues to take it correct to them the way he does.
The mayor of New York stood up again in Baltimore on Monday. Now we find out if the Obama administration is ready to do the same, and stand with him, send a message back to Newtown and to the world.
mlupica@nydailynews.com
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