Back when Richard M. Daley was Chicago's mayor, Hizzoner would hold a big, splashy press conference every year with cops and prosecutors and crime victims to unveil his new state gun-control legislation.

The Chicago media poobahs would shout their huzzahs, the NRA would fume and raise tons of money from angry members, and then Daley would quietly go back to his job as mayor and nothing much would ever happen in Springfield.

Rahm Emanuel is not Rich Daley.

Mayor Emanuel's Statehouse lobbyists are engaged in serious talks with the NRA and even the more strident Illinois State Rifle Association (something that Daley would never do, and vice versa) to try to work out a compromise on legislation to force convicted gun-possession violators to remain in prison for a lot longer than they already are. Emanuel himself is said to be actively involved by phone.

Illinois House Democrats were told during a private caucus meeting in Springfield last week that, despite what Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez says, inaction on concealed carry would have very serious consequences.

A federal appellate court has given the General Assembly until June 8 to pass a new law allowing some form of public carrying of loaded weapons. After that deadline, Illinois' laws against public carrying would be struck down. Illinois is the only state in the nation that totally bars concealed or open carry by citizens.

However, an aide to Alvarez told the House Judiciary Committee last week that the federal appellate ruling means nothing to the state.

It's difficult to argue with a point by the Washington Post's Greg Sargent shortly after news had broken of the mass murder at a Connecticut school.

"If today's shooting doesn't prompt action on guns," Sargent wrote on his Twitter account, "then nothing ever will."

You'd think that the shocking horror of 20 children and 6 adults murdered at that school by a crazed gunman using a semiautomatic assault rifle with high-capacity ammunition magazines would prompt some action, either nationally or at least locally.

But nationally the NRA has almost completely embedded itself within the Republican Party and allied itself closely with congressional GOP leaders. As a result, when one of its own members (Gabby Giffords) was nearly killed during an Arizona mass murder by yet another crazed gunman, the U.S. Congress did little more than applaud her return to the chamber.