It's interesting because Pelosi and other gun advocates were criticizing Carney's statement yesterday at a protest in front of the White House. Yet when he was asked for his own specifics, Pelosi didn't have any answers either.
"A group of gun control advocates gathered outside the White House Friday afternoon to protest in part Press Secretary Jay Carney’s statement that “today is not the day” to talk about new legislation aimed at preventing tragedies like the one that happened at a Newtown, Conn. elementary school earlier in the day."
"But even as they begged President Obama and lawmakers for action, they ended up sounding a lot like Carney."
"Organizers of the protest, made up of gun control advocates from across the country who were already in DC for another meeting on the day of the shooting, offered impassioned pleas for action from Obama. One even called on him to present a plan to curb violence by his next State Of The Union address. But they declined to offer specifics on what Obama or Congress should do, exactly.
“What I want is for the president to sit down with leaders in Congress and say, ‘OK, we’re losing 86 people [per day]. These horrific shootings are happening way too often. What are we going to do as policymakers?’” Andy Pelosi, a gun control advocate who said he lives “15 minutes” from the Newtown school. “We don’t want to wait for tomorrow or the next day. Today’s the day.”
"(The 86 number comes from dividing the more than 200,000 people gun control advocates say have been killed by guns in America since 9/11 by the number of days since the terrorist attack.)"
"Pressed, Pelosi declined to offer specific reforms, saying it was too early into the Newtown investigation to figure out what legal changes could have prevented the attack."
“What’s happened today is that a number of young people were killed in a school as well as teachers,” he said. “We don’t know all the details about what types of guns were used, how they got the guns. I would just be speculating and I’m not prepared to talk about that.”
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/12/white-house-protest-newtown.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
Carney said the same exact thing: we should think about policy answers to this tragically, recurring problem in American life but not today-which is what Pelosi had said:
"At the daily White House briefing Friday, Carney said that renewing the assault weapons ban “does remain a commitment” for Obama. But he declined to get into a policy debate with White House reporters while details of the Newtown shooting were still coming in."
“What I said is that today is not the day to — I believe, as a father, a day to engage in the usual Washington policies debates,” Carney said, according to the White House transcript of the briefing. “I think that that day will come, but today is not that day, especially as we are awaiting more information about the situation in Connecticut.”
He said the day will come but not on the day of the tragedy before we even know what happened. In other words, he chose not to do a Mitt Romney after Benghazi.
Don't get me wrong. Pelosi is right that we need to think about this. But there was no responsible way to get into anything yesterday and Pelosi himself had to admit it.
As for the families in the community of Newton, Conneticut all our thoughts and prayers are with you. What a tragic thing to have to bury a child. Life really isn't fair sometimes.
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