President Barack Obama has invited the mother of a child slain in the Sandy Hook massacre to use his usual weekend address as an antigun message.
“Nobody has a more important or powerful perspective on the [gun] issue than the families who have lost loved ones because of the scourge of gun violence,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said at the start of his April 12 briefing.
The woman, Francine Wheeler, was the mother of Ben, a six-year old, who was murdered Dec. 14 at the Connecticut school.
The tactic comes as the president is trying to push an apparently modest gun-control measure through the sharply divided Senate.
If passed by the Senate, the measure can be used in the fall of 2014 as a campaign-trail cudgel against Republican House members in swing seats.
The hard-nosed use of a dead child’s mother illustrates the president’s determined effort to combine passage of a gun-control bill with an emotional outreach to a constituency that is vital for his hoped-for victory in the 2014 mid-term election.
The ongoing pitch downplays gun rights, self-defense and large-scale urban crime in Democratic-run cities, such as Chicago, that already have extremely strict gun laws. Instead, the campaign focuses on worries of suburban women.
For example, Carney described the issue today as “common-sense measures to reduce gun violence and save lives.”
Suburban, swing-voting women tend to vote at lower rates during off-year elections. By highlighting the issue of suburban gun violence, Obama has tried to boost support for Democrats among suburban women, and he recently bumped up his own support among women by several points.
Obama frequently uses his weekend message to simultaneously promote his immediate and long-term political goals.
Gun-rights supporters say the bills being pushed by Obama would not have stopped the Sandy Hook killer — an emotionally deranged man — from using a legal weapon for illegal purposes. The killer used weapons purchased by his mother to kill 20 children and six unarmed teachers at the Connecticut school on Dec. 14.
Connecticut already have strict rules curbing gun purchases.