According to the AP, DeGette introduced the bill with Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., whose husband was killed in a 1993 mass shooting on the Long Island Rail Road in New York. From the AP:

[DeGette]'s district includes the site of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. It is also adjacent to last year's Aurora movie theater shooting site. In both of those attacks, the shooters' rifles were modified with high-capacity magazines. Those devices allow attackers to fire dozens of bullets without pausing to reload.

Though it's still unclear whether a ban can pass the Republican-controlled House, there were some promising signs from at least one Republican earlier today.

Rep. Peter King, also from New York, said on "Morning Joe": "I voted for the assault weapon ban back in 1994. My father was a police officer. I really don't know why people need assault weapons."

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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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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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Earlier this week, the White Plains Journal News ran a story with the provocative title "The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don't Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood." The story, written by Dwight R. Worley, made few bones about its slant, opening with the chilling details of the shooting murder of a Katona woman last spring.

But it wasn't the story that raised eyebrows. It was the revelation that after a Freedom of Information request, "Westchester provided the names and addresses of the county’s 16,616 active permit holders" to the paper. And, even worse, its online version featured an interactive map of all the "pistol permits registered with the Westchester County Clerk's Office," along with the invitation to "zoom in and out for more information and click on a dot to see details of a permit." The Journal did also mention, in an editor's note, that writer Dwight R. Worley owns a .357 Magnum. It didn't, however, include his New York City address.

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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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Keene, appearing on CNN, said that he thinks questions about whether or not Gregory broke the law for possessing the magazine, which is illegal in D.C., demonstrate the "craziness" of those gun laws.

"There are two lessons for him there," Keene said. "One, don't ask the government what's legal and what isn't legal because half the people you ask don't know. And secondly, that's a silly felony. It's a felony in Washington, D.C., to own that magazine or to be caught with a cartridge. So I really think what David Gregory did, while he was inadvertently flouting the law, was illustrated in a very graphic way, perhaps not intentionally, but in a graphic way just how silly some of these laws are."

Watch:

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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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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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"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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“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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Gregory was aggressively questioning LaPierre about whether he would support any new gun control laws when he may have run afoul of some which already exist in the District of Columbia.

And now, according to a report in Politico, Washington, D.C., police are investigating.

“The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating this matter,” said police officer and spokesman Araz Alali in an interview Tuesday. “There are D.C. code violations, D.C. code restrictions on guns, ammunition. We are investigating this matter. Beyond the scope of that, I can’t comment any further,” he said.

As Politico notes, D.C. has a restrictive gun control law -- and it's possible that whoever purchased or possessed the magazine could have crossed the line.

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"Let's be serious" Charles Krauthammer, pundit and former practicing psychiatrist, wrote recently in the Washington Post:

Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people — often right out of the emergency room — as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today.

Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.

A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be put away — and (forcibly) treated.

Random mass killings were three times more common in the 2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011 University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong civil-commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.

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“It's the one thing that would keep people safe,” LaPierre continued of his plan, “I said what I honestly thought and...what hundreds of millions of people all over this country believe will actually make a difference." All the evidence available suggests putting armed guns in school is actually not a particularly effective idea (there was an armed Sheriff’s deputy in Columbine High School on the day of the shooting, for instance).

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This morning, NRA president Wayne LaPierre held a press conference — occasionally interrupted by protesters — in which he explained where the organization stood in light of last week’s violence. But rather than stand behind the modest gun-regulation efforts brewing in Congress or even offer a simple message of condolence, LaPierre decided to go on the offensive, blaming everything from video games, movies, and music — "Natural Born Killers," a 20-year-old film, received a shout out — to Obama’s budget for the proliferation of mass shooters.

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With a staggering lack of self-awareness, LaPierre blamed public shootings on "genuine monsters" (without questioning how easy it is for these "monsters" to get access to guns), laying the blame squarely on the entertainment industry and the media, whose aim, he said is to "violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year."  He said:

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