“When Will You Find the Courage to Stand Up to the Gun Lobby?”

Since the Newtown massacre, a cultural war has been raging between those calling for stronger gun control laws and the gun fetishists. President Obama is empowered to issue stricter controls by executive order in such an emergency. The NRA warns that merely speaking Satan’s name will cause him to magically appear.

Emergency medical personnel reported that they were wading in blood when they responded to the mass shooting at an Aurora movie theater on July 20 last year. The ambulance was blood-spattered and rivulets of blood trickled down the vehicle’s floor. According to surviving eyewitnesses who had attended that midnight premiere of “Batman – The Dark Knight Rises,” the shooter reacted only with a sneer.

Twelve people fell victim to the well-planned massacre. The shooter had previously booby-trapped his apartment, hoping to kill the police investigators he knew would be combing his living quarters for clues. Court testimony in Colorado, given this week by survivors of the mass shooting orchestrated by James Holmes, awakened memories of the bloodbaths being perpetrated with increasing frequency across America, from Tucson to Aurora to Newtown.

Meanwhile, a cultural war rages between those demanding stricter gun laws and the gun fetishists. Roxanna Green, mother of nine-year-old Christina Taylor who was killed in the assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, asks in a television spot produced by the advocacy group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, “When will you find the courage to stand up to the gun lobby?”

The impact of the Newtown massacre prompted Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly—an ex-astronaut and Iraq war veteran—to launch a campaign for donations in order to pressure politicians for stronger gun laws.

The Obama administration clearly got the message. The president called on Joe Biden to form a commission before Christmas to come up with suggestions for the comprehensive reform of gun laws. Accordingly, Biden issued invitations to representatives of the four million member strong National Rifle Association and to Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer of guns and ammunition, to attend the White House meeting.

Biden was already convinced, remarking, “It’s critically important that we act.” He indicated that such presidential action might include the use of executive orders to restrict access to guns. Particular attention is being paid to outlawing semiautomatic assault rifles and magazines with a capacity of more than 10 rounds. Both had been partially prohibited by a law in effect between 1994 and 2004. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo urged Obama to possibly include new gun restrictions in his inauguration speech on January 21 or in his State of the Union speech in February.

The previously hesitant president needs to seize the moment. A majority of Americans currently support his gun control initiatives while a broad alliance of Republicans and gun enthusiasts oppose them, citing their concern that any weakening of the Second Amendment will result in disarmament of the entire nation, and depicting Obama as a tyrant cast in the same mold as Stalin and Hitler.