'A pretty shameful day for Washington," President Obama called it, with "pretty" being the only remnant of his famous cool. In the Rose Garden, he blamed the failure of gun control in the Senate Wednesday on three causes: "The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill." The Senators who voted against it are cowardly and had "no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn't do this. It came down to politics." And finally "a minority was able to block it from moving forward" through "this continuing distortion of Senate rules."

The...