By Molly K. Hooper and Mike Lillis - 12/18/12 06:37 PM ET
Should we be prepared for Johnny to sell out on this issue as well?
Zitat Republicans need to "have a discussion on guns" in the wake of last week's grade-school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told his conference Tuesday.
Speaking to his troops at a closed-door meeting in the Capitol, Boehner was mindful of conservatives' traditional opposition to new gun restrictions, emphasizing that Republicans wouldn't do "anything knee-jerk," according to a lawmaker in the room. But the Speaker also said he wants to "de-politicize" the issue of gun violence, which has been thrust dreadfully into the national spotlight following the murder of 26 people — 20 of them young school children — at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday.
Since the massacre, President Obama and a long list of congressional Democrats have urged tougher gun laws — including a reinstatement of the assault-weapons ban and the elimination of the gun-show loophole — but GOP leaders have remained largely silent about a violence-prevention strategy. The discrepancy has lent partisan undertones to the Sandy Hook response that Boehner clearly wants to eliminate.
Boehner said the GOP's strategy would be to examine the reasons that the mass shootings of recent years have been carried out, almost exclusively, by young, white males with mental illnesses, according to the lawmaker in the room.
"We need to have a discussion about guns," the lawmaker said, relaying Boehner's remarks, "and that doesn't mean that all of a sudden we abandon the Second Amendment or the NRA [National Rifle Association] or anything like that. But there needs to be a discussion and everybody needs to participate and we need to depoliticize it."
Excerpt, more at link. (I bet that Johnny really hates Louie Gohmert, for a lot of reasons!) Of course Johnny never does anything "all of a sudden," he, like other statists, always prefers turning up the heat under the pot very slowly.
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them."- Galileo Galilei