Admitting meaningful gun safety legislation was unlikely, Mr Feinblatt said, “We have a 50-50 Senate, which I don’t think is a majority.”
But he praised Mr Biden for taking action himself. In particular, he said the president’s efforts to regulate ghost weapons would prevent dozens of firearms-related deaths by preventing criminals from accessing the homemade weapons.
“Frankly, I think the ghost guns pose as much of a threat as I’ve seen, you know, in all my years working on this,” Mr. Feinblatt said. “He took on an industry and he won, and so I think he gets a lot of credit for it.”
Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement group, recalls being part of a meeting with Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama’s cabinet shortly after the Newtown shooting.
“I think if you’ve been in Washington for a while, there’s a sense of despair because you know how important this issue is, but it’s this huge effort to reach consensus,” recalled Mr. Wexler himself. “And I think that’s the feeling I felt in the room.”
Mr. Wexler, who was at the White House on Wednesday signing the police reform order, said he thought Mr Biden understood that not much had changed in the political environment in the past decade.
“There are solutions, you know, that are the same over and over, and there’s a tremendous energy right after the event,” said Mr. wexler. “And it just disappears, over time, disappears.”