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RAY SUAREZ: And we turn to the reaction to the president's proposals on guns, mental health and school safety.
JAY CARNEY, White House: The fact that's it's not easy doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
RAY SUAREZ:A day after President Obama announced his plan to attack gun violence, his spokesman acknowledged how hard it will be to get Congress to go along.
JAY CARNEY:If having an assault weapons ban become law again were easy, it would never have expired. If the variety of other actions that the president proposes we take as a nation were without conflict, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
RAY SUAREZ:That call for a new stricter prohibition against military assault-style weapons is already being rejected by House Republicans. It's also gotten a mixed response even among Senate Democrats, not to mention the gun lobby.
DAVID KEENE, National Rifle Association: Most of the proposals that have to do with firearms are simply feel-good proposals that have been tried in the past and won't work or won't have any real impact.
RAY SUAREZ:On "CBS This Morning," the National Rifle Association president, David Keene, did say the group might support universal background checks, if they could be made to work.
DAVID KEENE: The difficulty comes in when you're talking about you and me as next-door neighbors and you buy a new shotgun and want to sell one to me. How do you enforce a background check on that? We want to see the proposal. But, as a general proposition, the NRA has been very supportive of doing background checks.
RAY SUAREZ:Meanwhile, the head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Washington said the president had answered the group's written appeal for action.
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter:
MAYOR MICHAEL NUTTER, Philadelphia: The plan that President Obama unveiled yesterday includes much of what we asked for in that letter. We will work with the president and the Congress to get critically needed legislation reforms enacted now.
RAY SUAREZ:And Vice President Joe Biden told the mayors not to believe the voices of doubt.
VICE PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN: There are some who say the most powerful voice in this debate belongs to the gun lobby and those that demand a stop to these commonsense approaches to save lives. I think they're wrong. This time, this time will not be like times that have come before.
RAY SUAREZ:And away from Washington, in Aurora, Colorado, the movie theater where 12 people were killed last July reopened this evening, with a ceremony for the victims.
JEFFREY BROWN:We hone in now on some of the mental health issues involved.
Among the president's proposals, adding new psychologists to schools, asking teachers to help identify which students may need mental health treatment and easing the process for states to make information about individuals with mental illnesses available to the background check system.
To look at some of this, we're joined by Dr. Paramjit Joshi, director of psychiatry at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. And Barry Rosenfeld, professor of psychology and director of clinical training at Fordham University, he is a clinical forensic psychologist whose recent work has focused on assessing the risk of violence in patients.
And, Barry Rosenfeld, I would like to start right there. What's the problem that we need to understand in trying to determine in advance who might be capable of violence as we saw in Newtown?
BARRY ROSENFELD, Fordham University: Well, the essence of the problem is that it's a needle in a stay stack. So we have got almost an infinite number of people -- I shouldn't say infinite -- a very large number of people who are going to fit any profile that we might generate, and we want to find the one person who's potentially going to be homicidal.
There just isn't really a way statistically to identify or clinically to identify that person with any real accuracy.
JEFFREY BROWN:Dr. Joshi, same question to you. Does that mean such limits—we can't know? What can be done then?
DR. PARAMJIT JOSHI, Children's National Medical Center: The issue, however, is that—young children and adolescents who sometimes will have aggressive behaviors early on.
And I think whole issue of trying to access care early on would go a long way in trying to prevent some of the more aggressive and violent behaviors as these youngsters get older. So I really applaud President Obama's recommendations and proposals that he's put forth about early intervention, early identification, and increasing the number of resources, both in schools and also generally in the mental health system.
JEFFREY BROWN:Well, just to put a little bit more detail on there, in schools, for example, what in what he said would most help, do you think, would be most important?
