WASHINGTON — Demonstrating rapidly shifting attitudes toward gun control in the aftermath of a massacre in a Connecticut school, many pro-gun Congressional Democrats — including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader and a longstanding gun rights supporter — signaled an openness Monday to new restrictions on guns.
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a gun-rights advocate, said Monday that "everything should be on the table" as gun control is debated in the weeks and months to come.
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.
And in part, that reflected the reality that the president and his top aides are consumed with negotiating a potentially landmark budget bargain with Congressional Republicans to head off a fiscal crisis at the end of the year.
On Monday afternoon, Mr. Obama met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and three cabinet officials — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services; and Arne Duncan, the education secretary — to "begin looking at ways the country can respond to the tragedy in Newtown," an administration official said.
The official declined to give specifics on the state of the discussions other than to say "the work will continue."
Several people familiar with the deliberations at the White House in recent days said the administration, for now, was pursuing a strategy of taking time to develop a holistic response that could potentially be announced all at once, an executive order and a legislative proposal, rather than rushing to put out an executive order alone.
The thinking behind that approach, they said, was that the actions the president could take by himself — ordering federal agencies like the Social Security Administration to provide information to the background check system when benefits recipients have been deemed mentally ill or when employees and job applicants fail drug tests — would have only a minor impact relative to things that Congress could do, and that issuing such an order by itself could reduce momentum for greater action.
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