In 2010, the Supreme Court ended the long debate over whether the Second Amendment meant armed militias or an individual right to carry weapons, and decided the framers had counted “the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty."Natalie Keyssar/The Globe and Mail
After the Newtown elementary school massacre of 20 children and six adults by a deranged gunman, a tearful President Barack Obama vowed "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."
Nothing happened.
Three years later Mr. Obama has faced up to his own impotence on gun control.
Despair, not some ringing rallying call from the bully pulpit, was Mr. Obama's reaction to the massacre by a white supremacist of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church, including a pastor personally known to the President.
"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," Mr. Obama lamented, adding he understood that "politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now."
Gun control won't be an election issue in 2016.
Mr. Obama's promise of meaningful action after the Newtown, Conn., school shootings went nowhere, stymied not just by broad Republican opposition but also by many Democrats.
In fact, on Mr. Obama's watch, gun control in the United States has mostly been rolled back. In 2010, the Supreme Court ended the long debate over whether the Second Amendment meant armed militias or an individual right to carry weapons, and decided the framers had counted "the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty."
More than 20 states now have "stand your ground" laws allowing citizens to shoot and kill those who threaten them in public places. No longer is there a requirement to retreat.
Tough city laws banning handguns in Washington and Chicago – the first the site of the nation's government and the second Mr. Obama's hometown, and both burdened with poverty, crime and gun violence – have been struck down in court.
If anything, gun advocates have gained ground in the wake of gruesome massacres.
The National Rifle Association, the powerful, well-organized and generously-funded lobby group, has argued that armed civilians, including teachers in schools, could have prevented the scale of the massacres by giving victims a chance to fight back.
An NRA director made the same argument after the church killings in Charleston.
Charles Cotton blamed one of those killed – South Carolina state senator and pastor Clementa Pinckney, who had pushed for tougher gun control and voted against a new South Carolina law allowing patrons of bars to carry concealed weapons.
"Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue," said Mr. Cotton, who is also a trustee of the NRA's Civil Rights Defense Fund, in a comment posted to an online forum on guns.
Advocates of an armed citizenry, who contend that pilots with guns and teachers with guns and ordinary citizens with guns can thwart terrorists and homicidal maniacs and common criminals, aren't just found on the fringes of U.S. society.
Since the Newtown massacre, more than two dozen states passed laws allowing teachers to carry weapons or permitting school administrators to authorize school staff who already have weapons permits to bring the guns to school.
Not everyone thinks that makes students safer.
"Guns have no place in our schools," said Dennis van Roekel, then-president of the National Education Association, after the NRA called for arming teachers following Newtown. "Educators overwhelmingly support stronger laws to prevent gun violence, rejecting the NRA leaders' idea of putting more guns in schools."
But an unknown number of teachers now carry weapons in the classroom.
"I want to protect my students," said Kasey Hansen, 26, a special-needs teacher in Utah, who carries a pink handgun. "I think every teacher should carry," she told a News21 investigation into the arming of teachers, preachers and civilians.
Whether guns in classrooms or cockpits make the public safer remains hotly contested.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul claims the "most cost-effective way of preventing" another terrorist attack like the Sept 11, 2001, hijackings by al-Qaeda jihadists was for "all pilots to be armed."
Many are, under a federal program that deputizes pilots who are then allowed to carry loaded handguns while flying. The number of armed pilots is a secret but the program was oversubscribed when launched.
Just as Mr. Obama admits he has little hope for any emergence of political will to change gun laws, the crowd of those seeking to succeed him are either silent or vague.
Hillary Clinton, the all-but-certain Democratic presidential candidate for 2016, said Americans must face "hard truths about race, violence, guns and division," adding, "How many people do we need to see cut down before we act?"
But the hardest truth about guns in the United States isn't the outrage, shock and sadness that follow massacres such as those at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, a movie theatre in Aurora, Colo., or the church in Charleston. It is the grim reality that more than 30,000 Americans are killed annually by gun violence.
More 60 per cent are suicides; most of the rest are victims of domestic violence, street crimes and accidents. An estimated 9,000 are homicides. There are no accurate and complete numbers. Only a tiny handful involves gun owners defending themselves or their properties.
The response of Republican presidential hopefuls to the church massacre varied but no one dared mention gun control.
"There's a sickness in our country, there's something terribly wrong, but it isn't going to be fixed by your government," said Mr. Paul.
Hours after the massacre, Florida Senator Marco Rubio promised "if I am president of the United States, we will appoint justices and we will have an attorney-general who will protect our Second Amendment rights."
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush has proudly boasted that he was the first to sign a "stand your ground" law. "In Florida you can defend yourself anywhere you have a legal right to be … because in Florida we protected people's rights to protect themselves," he said in April.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, undeclared but widely presumed to be another Republican candidate for president, said gun control wasn't the answer. "Laws can't change this, only the goodwill and the love of the American people can let those folks know that that act was unacceptable," Mr. Christie told a Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference. "We need to do more to show that we love each other."