It was fine that Obama favored renewing the federal-assault weapons ban that ran out in 2004, but he knew well that the ban had not been nearly enough. He also knew that many Democratic legislators had lost their seats when they dared to challenge the orthodoxy promulgated by the National Rifle Association. It is hard to believe that Obama, a decidedly liberal teacher of constitutional law at the University of Chicago and a former protégé of Laurence Tribe at Harvard Law School, really and truly believes that the Second Amendment is to be read the way that the N.R.A. and the Republican Party say it is.

When he was a young politician on the South Side of Chicago, Obama took a less frustrating view of things. He was living in a city where the media was filled every day with reports of gun mayhem, and his view was firm. In 1996, when he ran for state senator in the Hyde Park area, his campaign filled out a questionnaire on his behalf that had been issued by the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organizations, in which he was asked, among other things, “Do you support state legislation to: ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?” Obama’s campaign answered “Yes.”

But Obama’s circle in the 2008 campaign knew the perils of such a clear-cut answer, and Robert Gibbs, the candidate’s close adviser and eventual press secretary, cast doubt on whether Obama’s team in 1996 had reflected his position accurately. “Why [his aide] filled out the questionnaire the way she did I have no idea, because it didn’t reflect his views,” Gibbs said at the time. The 1996 questionnaire also reflected similarly liberal views on abortion and the death penalty—views that Obama would later moderate, claiming that he had never approved the questionnaire.

It remains a question whether Obama’s 1996 staffer truly failed to reflect the nuances of Obama’s views. That is for the historians. And, at the moment, it barely matters. What matters is that Obama, having just won reëlection, is liberated to do the right thing. After the Tucson shootings, he talked about having—cliché of clichés—a “national conversation” about gun violence “not only about the motivations behind these killings but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental-health system.” This conversation never happened; further gun violence, of course, did.

A report in the National Journal points out that gun sales have gone up during Obama’s first term; the report attributes the sales spike to fears by gun owners that the President was on the brink of making moves to restrict gun purchases. If only it were true. Gun ownership is on the decline, over-all, but America still has a horrific gun problem. As Ezra Klein points out in the Washington Post, eleven of the worst twenty mass shootings in the past half century have taken place in the U.S.

President Obama is a decent man, and he clearly felt the tragedy in Connecticut deeply. That was evident from his brief statement at the White House today. We have grown accustomed to what will happen next. The President will likely visit a funeral or a memorial service and, at greater length, comfort the families of the victims, the community, and the nation. He will be eloquent. He will give voice to the common grief, the common confusion, the common outrage. But then what? A “conversation”? Let there be a conversation. But also let there be decisive action from a President who is determined not only to feel our pain but, calling on the powers of his office, to feel the urge to prevent more suffering. His reading of the Constitution should no longer be constrained by a sense of what the conventional wisdom is in this precinct or that. Let him begin his campaign for a more secure and less violent America in the state of Connecticut.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.

See our full coverage of the Newtown shooting.