This crass attempt at moral intimidation, contrasting Obama’s benevolent motives with his opponents’ child-endangering partisanship, is the essence of his case for new gun restrictions, which relies on emotional manipulation rather than logical argument…

Instead of explaining, for example, how background checks can thwart mass killers, who typically don’t have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records and who in any event can use guns purchased by someone else (as Lanza did), Obama simply assumes his plan will work and insinuates that anyone who opposes it does not care about children as much as he does.

Even as he claims to be troubled by a lack of empathy in the gun-control debate, Obama refuses to entertain the possibility that his opponents, like him, are doing what they believe to be right…

This from a man who says mass shootings, which remain thankfully rare, are becoming “routine”; who falsely asserts that Lanza used a “fully automatic weapon” and habitually conflates military-style semi-automatics with machine guns; and who claims background checks have “prevented more than 2 million dangerous people from getting their hands on a gun” — when in fact we don’t know how many of those people were actually dangerous or how many were actually prevented from obtaining firearms.