The special 360 town hall, guns under fire from the George Washington university in the nation's capital. In the nearly 7 weeks, since the rampage in Newtown Connecticut silenced 27 lives, a national debate over gun has only grown louder and more urgent. There was shooting just today in a middle school in southeast Atlanta, a student was hit. So the need for action is clear. Often however, the debate over what to do ends in shouting and pointed fingers. Which is why tonight we want, try to cut through the talking points and the slogans, and have an actual discussion that zeros in on some key issues and what goals, if any, or actually achievable. We've got people here with many different experiences, many different opinions and backgrounds, they are all represented in this room. Gun control advocates, people opposed to greater gun control, victims of crimes, people who use guns to protect themselves and their families. We start, though, with a look at what's at stake.

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Arurora, Newtown. It's an all too familiar pattern, mass shootings followed by a national dialogue on one of the most polarizing issues in America. Gun control.

But any attempt to alter our relatively easy access to guns rarely gets off the ground. The last time a federal gun control legislation was passed was in 1994. A year after, a shooter armed with semiautomatic handguns, shot and killed eight people in an office building in downtown San Francisco. The shooter was reportedly able to fire 30 shots without reloading, causing outrage among gun control advocates.

"The 19 assault weapons banned by this proposal are deadly, dangerous weapons. They were designed for one purpose only, to kill people."

The manufacturing of semiautomatic weapons with magazines of more than 10 rounds of ammunition was banned for ten years. But still, the shootings continued. In 1999, 23 people were wounded, and 13 killed at Columbine high school. The shooters used semiautomatic weapons they obtained illegally. By the time the assault weapons ban expired in 2004, its effectiveness was questioned. The congressional research service could not definitively found a cause of connection between firearms and violence. They wrote, quote, "Existing data do not show whether the number of people shot and killed was semiautomatic assault weapons declined during the ten-year-period that those firearms were banned.