While accusing the NRA of using children as “pawns in a political fight,” President Obama lost no time surrounding himself with children in an orchestrated media event launching his attack on firearms.

The NRA had merely pointed out that the president and his own children are surrounded by armed guards, while most everyone else’s children are not. In fact, Obama is not in favor of guards at schools, and the suggestion that he should be was “repugnant and cowardly,” the White House said.

A call to protect schools is not repugnant; but using children as theater props for a gun-banning agenda certainly is. Make your case, Mr. President, but please don’t stoop to this level. Children are certainly precious — on this we can agree. But they are precious enough not to be exploited for political purposes, especially when proposed political measures stand no chance of preventing random violence.

And yet there was Obama, arguing with children crowding at his elbow that his proposed gun restrictions should be adopted “if there is even one life that can be saved.”

Because saving even one life is so important, he said, he will use “whatever weight this office holds” to get Congress to prohibit all private sales of firearms, ban “military-style assault weapons” and impose a 10-round limit on magazines. The impact on children “should compel us to change,” he said.

Utahns, more than anyone, will look upon this sort of shameless grandstanding with suspicion. We have some of the lowest violent crime rates in America, and yet Utah fairly bristles with guns. Clearly it’s not the guns. It’s a complex array of cultural factors combined with mental illness that lead to horrific (yet statistically rare) incidents.

If the president is serious that saving even a single life is sufficient cause to deprive all Americans of their constitutional right to lawful use of firearms, then he should start with the gun categories that contain the most deaths.

So far, he is focusing on “military style” assault weapons which, even if you don’t like their looks, are involved in only a small fraction of violent gun incidents. In short, assault weapons are not the place for a gun-hater to start if his stated objective is to save even one life. Obama should be trying to ban handguns. That’s what criminals are using most.

Not that he would have any greater success if he started with handguns. Obama admitted last week that his anti-gun agenda faces difficult hurdles in Congress, where there are many Democrats who oppose him.

There are so many, in fact, that neither Obama nor the wild-eyed Sen. Feinstein of California, with her agenda to confiscate firearms, are going to make any headway. We predict that the outcome of the latest cry to ban semiautomatic weapons and magazines will be a goose-egg.

And so from the standpoint of political pragmatism, the exploitation of children by the president is even more shameful. We would guess that even some of those children can count votes, and they could tell Obama he’s not going to have enough.

“Ask your member of Congress,” Obama pleaded last week, “if they support universal background checks to keep guns out of the wrong hands. Ask them if they support renewing a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And if they say no, ask them why not.”

The better question to ask is why they should. Background checks would not have prevented the Sandy Hook shooting. Nor would a ban on “military style” assault weapons. That’s according to the arch-liberal Centers for Disease Control, which doubtless felt some pain in having to report that the 1994 assault weapons and magazine restrictions cannot be connected to any change in violent crime.

That’s because the “style” of guns in the civilian marketplace does not make them military. It’s just misleading rhetoric that’s being foisted upon those who don’t know that machine guns and grenade launchers have been illegal for decades and are not in civilian hands.

Weapons of war are simply not being used in crimes against our children, much as the gun banners would like you to believe that they are, and as much as Obama would like to use children at his press conferences as a cheap way to evoke emotion.

Fortunately, there are plenty of members of Congress who understand that we need realistic solutions, not window dressing.