President Barack Obama has established an interagency task force, led by Vice-President Joe Biden, and charged it with proposing gun control measures in January.
Obama will propose legislation to the Congress next year. He said he will act on the task force’s recommendations “without delay”.
Obama said: “We know this is a complex issue that stirs deeply held passions and political divides,” Obama said at the White House. “But the fact that this problem is complex can no longer be an excuse for doing nothing.”
The President said if anything had been learned from the Newtown shootings it should be a “sense of perspective”.
The difficulty in achieving legislative reform of gun laws was underlined in the media briefing when most questions focussed on the end-of-year “fiscal cliff”.
- Listen to Obama’s media briefing (36m)
