"What I will not do is have that negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people," President Obama said at the final press conference of his first term Monday. Obama was referring, of course, to the flailing talks with House Republicans about raising the debt limit. But he continued to offer fodder to the opposition in the gun-violence debate — the Drudge Report was already leading with Obama's quote before the press conference was over — with another of the administration's many recent slips of the tongue. Blame the trend on Vice President Joe Biden if you will, but the White House seems to have a little metaphor problem: It can't stop making gun references... even while making the case for gun control. Vice President Joe Biden said late last week after an unsuccessful meeting with the NRA that "there's no silver bullet" to stop mass shootings. When will Biden give his gun control recommendations to Obama? "I'm shooting for Tuesday," Biden said.

If Obama's going to (accidentally) drape himself in the glamour of the gun lobby, perhaps he should take one of their slogans to heart, too. Obama said he wouldn't turn to any desperate measures to get past Congress on the debt ceiling, like the $1 trillion platinum coin, federal scrip, or declaring the debt limit unconstitutional. The National Rifle Association famously cautions against unilateral disarmament: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

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Elspeth Reeve