Gun Violence

COPS ARE TRUE optimists. Surrounded by violence and facing danger every day, we have to be optimists. We represent the police chiefs from every major city in the nation - and we believe we can do more to make America safe. That's why we looked to the U.S. Senate for courage and leadership on gun violence, to enact reforms that are long overdue. With 94 percent of the public asking for better gun laws, we expected the Senate to do what cops do - protect the public. But a minority of senators protected themselves instead of the American people.

Victories often contain the seeds of future defeats. So it is - or should be - with the Senate's morally reprehensible rejection of expanded background checks for gun buyers. The outcome is a test of both an invigorated gun-safety movement and a gun lobby that decided to go for broke. The National Rifle Association assumed that blocking new gun legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre would firmly establish its dominance. Advocates of sane gun regulations would scatter in despair and be torn apart by recriminations.

Movita Johnson-Harrell longs to kiss her son on his neck. But Charles Andre Johnson, 18, was fatally shot two years ago in Mount Airy in a case of mistaken identity, Johnson-Harrell said. She and her husband, Yancy Harrell, who started a youth empowerment foundation after her son's death, joined about a dozen others Sunday at a prayer vigil for another victim of gun violence, 17-year-old Bernard Jamal Scott. The Overbrook High School 10th grader was an innocent bystander killed during an April 11 gunfight at Tustin Playground, across the street from the school.

Mean streets, even with full jails It is disheartening to see that Pennsylvania legislators again are looking to harsh mandatory-minimum sentencing laws as an answer to gun violence in Philadelphia ("Proposed gun law targets city," April 5). Mandatory sentencing dramatically increases the number of people in prison, even as countless studies have shown it does nothing to deter crime. Lawmakers should know better. In 2007, the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, an entity funded by the state specifically to guide sentencing policy, released a report that showed mandatory sentencing has no impact on recidivism.

NOW THAT THE legislation for further background checks for gun control has failed, where are we going? I think this proposal was just a smokescreen to make people think that something was actually going to happen. Expanded background checks are not the answer to controlling gun violence. What we really need are controls on semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines. We should also have automatic jail sentences for those caught with an unregistered gun. If you want a licensed handgun in your home, that's certainly your right, and I have no objection.

DURING HIS 2012 campaign for re-election, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey was mysteriously absent from the headlines - so much so that Ed Rendell said he was running a "noncampaign. " Now, after cruising to victory, Casey seems to be all over the news. In December, the Democrat sacrificed his NRA-approved standing to rally behind new gun laws. And earlier this month, he announced that he is jumping the fence to support same-sex marriage. Daily News reporter Sean Collins Walsh sat down with Casey last week in his Washington office (the same one John F. Kennedy occupied during his brief Senate career)

DENVER - Gaspar Perricone got a child-size .22-caliber rifle for his first birthday. In high school, he went duck hunting before class and stowed his shotgun in his pickup. Then he went to work for a Democratic U.S. senator and formed a group to promote hunting and fishing issues. Now he has landed in the wide-open space between the two poles in the national gun debate. The group Perricone cofounded with another former aide to Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, the Bull Moose Sportsmen's Alliance, took the unusual step this month of releasing a poll that showed wide support among hunters for universal background checks.

TRENTON - Gov. Christie wants to add new gun penalties to state law, ease restrictions on the involuntary commitment of the mentally ill, mandate photo IDs for firearms purchases, and forbid children from buying violent video games without parental permission. Those are just a handful of more than a dozen proposals on violence that Christie, like other state and national lawmakers, is offering in the aftermath of the mass shooting Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.