White House officials remained vague and noncommittal about how President Obama would translate into action his soaring rhetoric Sunday in Newtown, when he appeared to presage an effort to curb access to guns. But many Democrats, including several from conservative states, said Congress should take up the issue next year, and one Senate chairman promised hearings. Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, an advocate of gun rights who drew attention in 2010 by running a commercial that showed him firing a rifle into a piece of legislation serving as a target, said “everything should be on the table” as gun control is debated in the coming weeks and months.
The receptiveness to new gun laws from figures like Mr. Manchin suggested the National Rifle Association, long one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, would face a strong test of its influence in the coming months if it sought to fend off tougher restrictions. Leaders of the organization have declined interview requests since the shootings, the group’s Twitter account has gone silent, and it has deactivated its Facebook page. As the criminal inquiry proceeded, investigators studying a computer taken from the house of the Connecticut gunman, Adam Lanza, said it was so badly damaged that they were not optimistic that they would be able to get any information from it, a law enforcement official said Monday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has more expertise in computer forensics than Connecticut’s state forensic laboratory, has been part of the effort to recover data from the computer, the official said. A federal law enforcement official said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had determined that Mr. Lanza and his mother, Nancy Lanza, visited firing ranges together and separately in recent years, with one known occasion of their going together. It was not clear whether they had both fired weapons on that visit.
The White House offered no elaboration on Monday of the president’s thinking or the options he would consider; it tried to tamp down expectations of quick action. In part, that reflected the complicated politics of gun control, as the president’s advisers weighed whether the horror of Newtown had changed the dynamics in Washington enough to make possible measures that were earlier deemed very unlikely to pass.
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