In the second part of the interview, Bloomberg addressed the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., calling for tighter restrictions on gun control, urging Americans to contact local representatives to push for the same:

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Ohio-based Buckeye Firearms Foundation has launched an Armed Teacher Training curriculum to offer gun training to teachers and school workers. According to Ohio's Fox 19, "As of Wednesday, the Armed Teacher Training Program has attracted more than 600 applicants from several states including Ohio, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and West Virginia." More than one-third of the 600 applicants are female.

According to Fox, the program, which will officially launch in Spring 2013, will take teachers through intensive gun training and will have course attendees take the same firearms test as law enforcement officers.

[h/t Think Progress]

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According to the Delhi police department, 274 Delhi women have applied for gun licenses and some 1,200 more have called the licensing department to inquire. "These include not only the average working woman, but even students who travel long distances to colleges and even their concerned parents. They were eager to find out more on the procedure to acquire arms," a Delhi police officer told the Times of India.

India's restrictive gun laws require a "grave and imminent threat" to the applicant's life in order to be approved, making gun ownership rare. The 274 applications received in the last three weeks amount to more than half of the applications submitted in 2011.

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"I think there are a vast majority of responsible gun owners out there who recognize that we can't have a situation in which somebody with severe psychological problems is able to get the kind of high capacity weapons that this individual in Newtown obtained and gun down our kids. And, yes, it's going to be hard," Obama told host David Gregory, recalling the day he heard of the murder of 20 children in Connecticut as the worst day of his presidency.

Obama also discussed fiscal cliff negotiations. He repeatedly placed the blame on Republicans for failure to reach a compromise, noting the GOP "had trouble saying yes to a number of repeated offers." In contrast, the president defended his own record of spending cuts, telling Gregory:

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The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise suppressor, those metallic tubes better known as silencers. By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder.

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Until last week my stance on the Second Amendment was essentially, "Our government can't be trusted with a monopoly on lethal power. As such, the right to resist tyranny embedded in our constitution justified the tragic deaths that would inevitably result from the proliferation of these incredibly deadly weapons."

I deployed to the Iraq War in 2004 as a U.S. Marine. I came to see my experience in Iraq as that of a pawn doing the work of liars, profiteers and chickenhawks. I say this to illustrate the point that my outlook on gun control comes from the standpoint of a Constitution-observing public servant and of a person who came to question the integrity of our system of governance to the very core. In short, I was reverent of the Second Amendment's freedom-guarding intent. I still am.

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The last bill would have prohibited any "magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition" except for any "attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition." Large-capacity magazines were used in the Aurora and Newtown massacres.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has also promised to introduce an assault weapons ban when the new Congress convenes. That bill is modeled on the federal ban, which expired in 2004. Both new bills would not outlaw the possession of banned equipment that is already in circulation. Senator Feinstein has cited a Department of Justice study that the ban reduced gun deaths by 6.7 percent.

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“I really think what David Gregory did while he was inadvertently flouting the law was illustrating in a very graphic, perhaps not intentionally, but in a graphic way just how silly some of these laws are,” NRA President David Keene said yesterday. We don’t often say this, but the NRA is absolutely right.

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CBS News reports:

The Utah Shooting Sports Council said it would waive its $50 fee for concealed-weapons training for the teachers. Instruction featuring plastic guns was to start Thursday inside a conference room at Maverick Center, a hockey arena in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Valley.

It's an idea gaining traction in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting.

In Ohio, the Buckeye Firearms Association said it was launching a test program in tactical firearms training for 24 teachers initially.

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In a statement Wednesday, Horne said that the "ideal solution" would be to have an armed police officer in each school, but "budget considerations" make that unfeasible.

On Friday, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre also proposed putting "armed police officers in every single school in this nation," in response to the Sandy Hook school shootings.

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On MSNBC, he said the group's post-Newtown plan to put armed guards in schools is a "dumb-ass idea."

Mayor Michael Nutter said that the ludicrousness of the argument was underscored when a gunman shot and killed two firefighters in upstate New York.

"I guess that Mr. LaPierre would say that firefighters need to have armed guards go with them. I think it just shows that that was a completely dumb-ass idea from the start,” Nutter said. “We need to ban assault weapons. We need to ban the high capacity clips and magazines. We need serious background information system upgrade.”

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Even Gregory, who convincingly played a devil's advocate to LaPierre Sunday, was dismissive of its effect on Sunday. “I mean the fact that that it just doesn't work is still something that you're challenged by if you want to approach this legislation again,” he said of the ban to New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, a supporter of the ban.

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The Journal News submitted requests for records "for all permit categories," citing the Freedom of Information Act, as part of a larger feature aimed at reexamining the area's gun ownership in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings.

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"Here's another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people," LaPierre said on Friday. "Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse."

But as the New York Times reports today, the gun industry is, in fact, closely tied to the video game industry, because both benefit from marketing tie-ins. One example the Times cites is Electronic Arts' "Medal of Honor Warfighter" game, for which EA created a promotional website that touted the gun, knife and combat gear manufacturers represented in the game, including the gun company the McMillan Group and Magpul, which sells high-capacity magazines.

From the Times:

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White male Republicans in redder regions are still the base for untrammeled gun rights, even if they're not the only ones. But when it comes to women, that number had been slowly moving in the NRA's favor -- and it's all part of a plan.

Four years ago, 30 percent of women told Pew that gun rights were more important to them than controlling gun ownership. This April, that number was 39 percent -- still less than the 60 percent of men who favored gun rights, but a dramatic rise nonetheless. And these women were likelier to be white; in the same poll, 57 percent of whites picked gun rights over gun control. African Americans and Latinos overwhelmingly told pollsters they preferred gun control.

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Police Chief Gerald Pickering said Tuesday that the 62-year-old loner, William Spengler, brought plenty of ammunition with him for three weapons including a military-style assault rifle as he set out on a quest to burn down his neighborhood just before sunrise on Christmas Eve.

And when firefighters arrived to stop him, he unleashed a torrent of bullets, shattering the windshield of the fire truck that volunteer firefighter and police Lt. Michael Chiapperini, 43, drove to the scene. Fellow firefighter Tomasz Kaczowka, 19, who worked as a 911 dispatcher, was killed as well.

Two other firefighters were struck by bullets, one in the pelvis and the other in the chest and knee. They remained hospitalized in stable condition and were expected to survive.

On Tuesday, investigators found a body in the Spengler home, presumably that of the sister a neighbor said Spengler hated: 67-year-old Cheryl Spengler. Spengler's penchant for death had surfaced before. He served 17 years in prison for manslaughter in the 1980 hammer slaying of his grandmother.

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“The public wants guns out of the schools, not in the schools,” he said. “And they're not asking for a security official or someone else. I don’t think the NRA is listening. I don’t think they understand most Americans would protect the Second Amendment rights and yet agree with the idea that not every human being should own a gun, not every gun should be available at any time, anywhere, for anyone."

Watch:

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More than 70,000 people have signed the petition. But what if the UK doesn't want him back?

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