WH Says Obama Supports Renewing AWB-Congress Won’t Act

On Monday, troche White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that President Obama supports renewing the Assault Weapons Ban, order but pointed to Congress’s intransigence on the issue of gun control as the reason the administration hasn’t aggressively pursued the measure.

“He does support renewing the assault weapons ban,” Carney said at his press briefing, a day following the mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that left seven people dead, including the gunman.  During follow up questions on why more isn’t being done to reinstate the AWB, Carney added that, “there has been reluctance by Congress to pass that renewal.”

While running for president in 2008, Obama was a vocal supporter of renewing the federal ban on certain types of semi-automatic weapons, but after taking office Obama put gun control on the backburner, which many argue was a politically motivated decision, a concerted effort to avoid ruffling the feathers of gun owners in key swing states.

“The likelihood that a president in a closely contested election is going to do anything to mobilize the other candidate’s base approaches zero,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication in Philadelphia, told Bloomberg News. “If there’s any possibility that the gun rights constituency isn’t enamored of Romney, and hence might be less likely to vote, why would you want to rile them up?”-[source]