director of atf. hi, ken. do you want to get a sense of the flavor of debates over gun policy? do you want to get a sense of that without wading too much into the dark pro gun corn rz of the internet? sometime treat yourself to reading the comments under one of these friendly little videos produced by the atf. they produce these videos to explain what s going on with the nation s gun laws. you only have to get to comment two on this video, this atf video, before poor old ken melson is denounced as a jack-booted goon. the atf is the agency in charge of dealing with illegal guns in this country. the shootings in tucson this past weekend as far as we know were not committed with an illegal gun, they were committed with a gun and ammunition that seems to have been purchased at least sort of legally. we don t yet know all of those details. if you want to know how sclerotic our nation s policies are about anything having to do with guns, if you want to be how sclerotic the politics are abo
is our policy makering apparatus able to make a change when we need a change? or are there specific types of problems we face as a country that we re just helpless to confront? in the wake of the tucson shootings, the office of speaker john boehner has started giving anonymous quotes to reporters, hinting that the narrowest possible, least politicized reinstatement of previous policy to address one of the ways that things went so horribly wrong in tucson, that policy change is off the table. it is not even worthy of debate. the alleged shooter in arizona fired 31 bullets before she was subdued. he killed or wounded 20 people before he was stopped. and he was stopped only because he had to reload. the extended magazine he had that allowed him to keep shooting 31 times before reloading, that is something he could not have legally bought, even just a few years ago. the law banning a magazine that large expired in 2004. it is hard to imagine a narrower, less restrictive legislative respons
from corporations which neither party can. i would also say for the democratic efforts, the dnc is important. but outside groups, as we ve seen with supreme court cases, have really now been able to take advantage of those to leverage, you know, their impact. so again, we want to make sure from our side that everybody is moving in the same direction, moving down the same stream and it s good, you know, i really welcome the new chairman s commitment to that and tip my hat to my boss, chairman michael steele. i was really proud on how he handled his exit. i m proud to call him a friend and proud to have worked for him. doug, the reason i think it s so interesting to look at the balance of power between the parties an these outside groups, do look at how the structure of power affects political outcomes in this country is because it seems like it s one of the few things in american politics that s absolutely in flux and we don t know where it s going to end up. i was thinking about that
but up in philadelphia, we could see a half foot to maybe even ten inches of snow. but new york city, boston, another big time snowstorm and we know how much problems we have trying it clear the streets there. and guess what, we could be going through that again as we head into your wednesday night across the northeast and new england. all right. thank you, paul. we re assuming that both mayor bloomberg and governor christie have gotten the memo about this forecast. thanks very much. well, chuck, coming up here on the daily rundown, we ll get into this growing controversy over this nation s and frankly this state s gun laws. would things have turned out differently here in tucson if the gun regulations were different. we ll talk about the new push to outlaw those high capacity ammunition clips like the one used in the attack right here. there s a big movement in washington. we ll get into that. but first, a look ahead at the president s schedule.