Obama Recruits Children to Push Gun Bans: Will Act On His Own, Prod Congress (+video)

Acting just a month after the Connecticut school shootings, President Obama will unveil a sweeping package of gun controls Wednesday and will challenge Congress to ban high-capacity magazines and military-style semi-automatic rifles involved in recent shooting rampages.

Mr. Obama, who will make his announcement surrounded by children who wrote letters to him about gun violence, is expected to propose some moves he can take on his own. He also will demand that Congress break a decades-long refusal and enact the first new controls on firearms and ammunition since the early 1990s.

States are acting already.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday signed into law the strictest gun-control measures in the country, which will ban assault weapons, restrict ammunition and move to prevent the mentally ill from obtaining firearms . . .

Similar proposals are likely to meet stiff resistance on Capitol Hill, where the Senate’s top Democrat has said the ban on semi-automatic “assault weapons” has little chance of passing. Lawmakers have jealously guarded their powers when it comes to action on gun regulations.

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