Is Newtown Obama's Birmingham Moment? - Todd Purdum, Vanity Fair

His Birmingham Moment?

It took a traumatic turn of events in Alabama to show John F. Kennedy that he had to confront the issue of civil rights. The Newtown massacre may be a precipitating event for Barack Obama.

Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect public statements on the Sandy Hook shootings summed up the grief and shock that even the most distant observer—and certainly every parent—must feel about last Friday’s unspeakable events. But I think I detected an even more personal elegiac note: regret that he himself has not done more to grapple with the issue of guns.
“Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?” the president asked in Newtown, Connecticut, on Sunday. “I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.”
So I can’t help wondering if the bullets of Sandy Hook Elementary will be for Obama what the snarling dogs and high-pressure fire hoses of Birmingham, Alabama, were for John F. Kennedy in 1963: the human tragedy that will force him to take a political risk, simply because it is right.

“Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence,” said John F. Kennedy. “Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality.”

Not that Obama has lacked political courage or been averse to all risk. Overhauling health care was no walk in the park, and he paid a big price for his efforts. But ever since Bill Clinton lost Democratic control of Congress—and many members lost their seats—in the wake of the passage of the assault-weapons ban in 1994, Democrats, especially the pragmatic variety, of which Obama is certainly one, have been extremely wary of sitting on that hot stove a second time.
As a reporter for The New York Times, I covered the passage of the 1994 ban and lived to see some of its results. When Bill Clinton took his vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1995, I spent many hours covering him—and many more just hiking and enjoying one of the nation’s great national parks. When, by chance, in the Grand Teton National Park visitors’ center I came across my old congressman and fellow Chinese-laundry patron from Brooklyn, Chuck Schumer, now a senator, I was stunned to find him sporting a three- or four-day growth of beard. I asked if he’d been sitting shiva. He replied that, no, F.B.I. director Louis Freeh had told him he was a marked man as one of the proponents of the bill, and so he’d sprouted some cover, just in case.
The 1994 law was no panacea; it was rife with loopholes and expired (by design) in 2004. But it banned outright certain models of the sort of AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in the Sandy Hook killings, while allowing equally destructive models to be sold. Still, how haunting to think there was even a chance such a law could have made the difference. Australia has had better luck with the much stricter version of a ban on assault weapons that it imposed after a mass shooting in 1996, and it doubled down on the effort, spending $400 million to buy some 650,000 existing guns from their owners. Congress and the courts would seem unlikely to back any such law, and with more than 200 million guns in circulation here, any buy-back would be much more complicated and costly.
But the fact remains that the United States is still the only developed country or non–war zone on Earth with such an abundant supply of guns. That should worry us, just as our Jim Crow legal system worried John Kennedy, in no small part because of the fodder it gave the Communist bloc, not to mention the rest of the industrialized and developing world, to mock us. Kennedy, too, had shown conspicuous courage on many matters, but for a long time, he temporized on civil rights. After images of little children being terrorized or carted off to jail during Martin Luther King’s protest in Birmingham electrified the world, Kennedy proposed the first comprehensive civil-rights bill since Reconstruction.
“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said in a nationwide television address on June 11, 1963—the same day that Vivian Malone, whose sister, Sharon, is the wife of Attorney General Eric Holder, helped peacefully integrate the University of Alabama. “It is as old as the Scriptures, and is as clear as the American Constitution.” He added: “Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality.”
It seems to me that Obama said something very similar in Newtown. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?” the president asked. “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited upon our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”
John F. Kennedy did not live to see his proposed civil-rights bill become law; that was left to Lyndon Johnson and a stunning bipartisan coalition in Congress. Is it too much to hope that Barack Obama will not only take the lead on combating this scourge, but succeed in seeing it checked? These dark and shortening days are a season of miracles, after all.

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