Guns cast shadow over Obama presidency

Barack Obama has long had a gun problem. Take the moment in his first presidential election campaign, when he was caught making unguarded comments to donors in San Francisco.

Speaking about people in industrial towns in mid-Western states, suffering because of job losses, he said they "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them".

That quote - recorded on the page, but not on tape - seemed to reinforce the image of someone who looked down on the values of Middle America.

His primary opponent, Hillary Clinton (who, at that point, was fighting an almost certainly losing battle) seized on those words to paint him as elitist.

At a different point in the contest (and for a candidate with a lot less luck), it might have stuck, but it wasn't a game changer - in the primary or the general election.

How very different to Mitt Romney's unguarded comment in 2012.

Barack Obama's Republican challenger WAS filmed speaking to donors about the 47% of Americans who, he claimed, would vote for Obama "no matter what" and who, in his words, believe "they are victims... the government has a responsibility to care for them... they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."

Those words - seized upon gleefully by the Obama campaign (although not, to his staff's consternation, by Barack Obama himself during his disastrous first presidential debate) arguably cost Mitt Romney the election.

They slotted neatly into the narrative from which (partly because of his gaffes, partly because of the focused Democratic strategy) he'd struggled to escape: he was an unfeeling member of the boss class, who couldn't empathise with the struggles of average Americans.

Unlike some presidential candidates - think of John Kerry's duck-hunting trip in 2004 or, indeed, Mitt Romney, boasting of "hunting small varmints more than two times" in 2008 - Obama never tried to "cling" to guns on the campaign trail as a way of pandering to voters.

But the issue of gun crime has continued to cling to him during his years in office.

From the 2011 attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, to the killings in Aurora, Oak Creek and Newtown in 2012, to last week's murders in Charleston, there've been more than a dozen mass shootings since he came to office, which have warranted a presidential intervention.

Many of those interventions have been very powerful.

His speech after the Tucson attack, when he announced that the congresswoman, who'd been shot point blank in the head, had opened her eyes, was particularly praised.

But, if he'd hoped to open the eyes of Congress to the necessity of legislation, he failed.

The shooting dead of 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was the moment when it might have happened.

But it didn't.

Neither a ban on assault weapons nor universal background checks on gun owners gained enough support on Capitol Hill to become law, despite opinion polls suggesting that a majority of the public supported those changes.

And it wasn't just Republicans, but several Democrats who voted against the measures.

Why? Political considerations aside, America's attachment to guns remains an issue that confounds both foreigners and many Americans.

Is it proof of a hopelessly militarised nation and the power of the gun lobby, or simply a national blind spot?

Theories come and go, with varying degrees of anti-Americanism, but they never quite get to the bottom of the issue.

Although maybe Barack Obama hit at a truth when he lumped guns in with religion ("clumsily", as he later said) in 2008.

The right to bear arms is, for many Americans, an act of faith, a sense of who they are, in a way that's hard for others to understand or to counter with rational arguments.

That makes it a particular challenge for any leader, but especially for one, such as the current US president, with the reputation for taking a more cerebral approach to most matters.

And many would see his political caution as the reason why he suppressed his feelings about gun control on days of mass shootings - until now.

To Europeans, it might seem ludicrous - if not downright tasteless - to suggest that arming teachers or pastors is the best way to prevent an armed man with murderous intent from massacring a class full of children or a church full of worshippers, but many Americans genuinely believe that.

It's not by chance that there are almost as many guns as people in the US.

I got a glimpse of that thinking last year, when I visited a gun club in rural Wisconsin, with a man who appreciates both sides of the gun debate.

Amar Kaleka was hoping to be the Democratic Party's congressional candidate - running on a platform that emphasised the need to regulate access to certain types of weapons.

His motivation was personal. His father was the president of the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

In 2012, he'd become one of the six victims of a white supremacist gunman, who'd entered the building.

Amar is a recreational shooter. As the cameras rolled, he gamely took aim at a few skeets (or clay pigeons), but had almost as little success hitting the target as he did debating with the members of the gun club.

They were adamant that any attempt to increase background checks on gun owners was an assault on their hard won freedoms.

I was watching a dialogue of the deaf - or a dialogue of people wearing ear protectors.

And as I looked at the photographs in the club bar, showing Barack Obama's face inside a toilet seat and/or with a Hitler moustache painted on it, I realised that the president could never hope to convince these people.

Nor could Amar. He didn't make it to Congress.

The victims of the Charleston shooting

And it is with Congress that Mr Obama's frustration over guns is most keenly felt.

If President George W Bush had a great chance of dealing with another one of America's intractable political problems - immigration reform - in his second term, the Sandy Hook tragedy offered his successor the moment to push through some, limited changes to gun laws.

Neither succeeded.

In his resigned demeanour, as much as in his words last Thursday, Mr Obama seemed to suggest that this was among the greatest regrets of his presidency.

It was a point he emphasised in his interview with comedian Marc Maron that was published on Monday, saying he was "pretty disgusted" that, after the killing of 20 six-year-olds, "Congress literally does nothing".

He insists that he isn't giving up on gun control, but the political reality is that time is not really on his side.

An increasingly lame duck leader is unlikely to be much of a match for the duck hunters.