Mr Orator and the Blowhard have a battle on their hands (Bucket needed)

The Scotland Herald ^ | January 18, 2013 | Alison Rowat. columist & film writer

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THEY are the unlikeliest double act since Tom and Jerry.

One is quiet and thoughtful, the other makes PT Barnum look like Marcel Marceau. One has great power and responsibility, the other reaches for the foghorn in a New York minute. When placed beside this pair, even the shotgun wedding of John McCain and Sarah Palin begins to look sensible.

As far as we know, Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, did not put in a personal plea for Piers Morgan, second-best-known host of CNN's Tonight, to join him in a quest to bring in serious and lasting gun control laws. Thus far, Mr Obama has managed just fine in the wing-man stakes with Joe Biden. But now a former editor of a British red top has wrapped himself in the red white and blue and made himself Mr Obama's unofficial deputy in the matter of gun control. Suddenly, magnificently, there is a point to Piers.

After the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary, in which 20 children and six adults were murdered, Mr Obama promised to respond with plans for reform. This week he delivered. He signed 23 executive orders, including ones that will improve background checks on gun buyers.

The big-ticket items, the ones that will require the approval of Congress, included a ban on rapid-firing assault weapons, outlawing armour-piercing bullets, and bringing in a criminal background check for all gun sales, including private transactions.

"I will put everything I've got into this," said Mr Obama. He will need to. It is quite a challenge for the world's most powerful elected politician to set himself. The President so often accused of not wanting to sweat the big stuff has pledged to make America – 9960 gun murders in 2010 – a safer place...

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Comments?

[SuziQ]

Obama isn’t serious about reducing gun crime, he’s simply posturing for the gun control wing of the Democrat Party. If he were TRULY serious, and wanted to severely reduce the 9,000 plus ‘gun murders’ in this country annually, he wouldn’t be going after the rifles, which are used in less than 400 murders each year. He would have to go after handguns, which are used for most of the killing, and largely in urban areas among minorities. But that’s an “Inconvenient Truth” Obama wants to ignore, because then he’d have to face the fact that those urban areas with large numbers of handgun murders among minorities are, and have been run by Democrats for the most part, for over 40 years.