Connecticut school shooting: Democrats promise bill to ban assault weapons A bill to restrict the use and sale of weapons like the high-powered Bushmaster .223 that coroners said had killed many of the children at Sandy Hook, would be introduced in the next session of the US Congress, promised senior Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein "It will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession. Not retroactively but prospectively. And it will ban the same for big clips, drums or strips of more than 10 bullets," she told NBC News, adding that she expected Mr Obama to support the bill. Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, repeated his call that the ineffectual hand-wringing that followed previous mass shootings must not be repeated, arguing that gun reform should be "number one" on the president's agenda. If he does nothing during his second term, something like 48,000 Americans will be killed with illegal guns. That is roughly the number of Americans killed in the whole Vietnam War," said Mr Bloomberg, a co-chair of Mayor's Against Illegal Guns. As an alternative, Joe Lieberman, an independent Senator for Connecticut, called for a national 9/11-style 'commission on mass violence' to find ways to reduce future shootings in the United States, including an assault weapons ban, and circumvent legislative gridlock, but cautioned that there was "no one solution" to the problem. "We ought to restore the assault weapons ban, not to take anybody's guns away that they have now but to stop the manufacturing of these weapons," he said. We've got to continue to hear the screams of these children and see their blood until we do something to try and prevent this from happening again. However gun control remains a deeply polarising issue in the United States, with other political figures, including William Bennett, the former Reagan administration education secretary, arguing that the Sandy Hook shootings made the case for more guns, not fewer. Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas, agreed saying that "an open mind" was needed in future negotiations over guns, arguing that if the school's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, had been armed the situation could have turned out differently. "I wish to God she had had an M4 in her office locked up and so when she heard gunshots," he told Fox News, "she takes his head off before he can hurt those kids."