After a white supremacist shot dead nine worshippers in a church in South Carolina in June, President Obama did not mask how tired he was of acknowledging such atrocities.
“Let’s be clear,” he said. “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”
He made it plain, however, that he did not expect this moment of reckoning would happen any time soon. For Mr Obama, the watershed was the Sandy Hook tragedy of 2012.
After 20 children and six adults were killed, the White House pressed for new gun controls. Mr Obama made a dozen proposals to Congress, including universal background checks on gun purchases and a ban on assault weapons.
The proposals went nowhere. A compromise bill was defeated in the Senate in 2013, despite wide public support. Having pledged to make gun control a central issue of his second term, Mr Obama was left marooned. America has the highest gun murder rate among developed nations: more than 30 a day.
Advertisement
Yet for the first time in more than two decades, there is more support for gun rights than gun control, claims the Pew Research Centre: “Currently, 52 per cent say it is more important to protect the right to own guns, while 46 per cent say it is more important to control gun ownership.”
Terry McAuliffe, the governor of Virginia, said yesterday: “There are too many guns in the hands of people who should not have guns.”