The president of the National Rifle Association on Thursday said there was no negotiation with the Obama administration on gun rights in an effort to stem violence in the wake of the shootings at a Connecticut elementary school last month.

“There isn’t on guns,” NRA President David Keene told CNN. “There is not on guns, not that I can see.”

Keene’s remarks came as Vice President Joseph Biden on Thursday said he saw a growing consensus for the federal government to seek universal background checks for gun buyers and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.

But the NRA president told CNN that the association could work with the White House in trying to get those who have been determined by law to be mentally ill into a national registry of those who are barred from purchasing firearms.

“That would make a difference, because the people who have been involved in these shootings have been people who are severely mentally ill,” Keene said, referring to the Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 children and six adults died.

“We don’t think you should demonize everybody who’s got a mental problem, but the fact is that there are people who are not in the gray area,” Keene told CNN. “They should not be allowed to buy firearms.”

Earlier on Thursday, the nation’s largest gun lobby said it was “disappointed” at a meeting a representative attended with Biden’s task force seeking solutions to end gun violence in the nation.

The NRA said the session, which included five other gun-rights organizations and other Obama administration officials, amounted to a strategy session on how to thwart the Second Amendment.

“We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment,” the NRA said in a statement after the session.

“While claiming that no policy proposals would be ‘prejudged,’ this task force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearms owners — honest, taxpaying, hard-working Americans.”

In his CNN interview, Keene expanded on the NRA’s statement — characterizing many of the recommendations put forth in the session as “feel-good proposals.”

“We know, and we knew, going into this meeting, what the president’s position on the so-called assault-weapons ban is — the same position he’s had for years,” he said. “These are not new positions.

“The vice president had said that we would do this with an open mind, but at the meeting he said, ‘No, we’ve already made up our mind on that.’ No, there’s not going to be any agreement on that,” Keene said.

He told CNN that he believed that the Biden panel was “checking a box. They were able to say: ‘We’ve met with the NRA. We’ve met with the people who are strong Second Amendment supporters.’

“There are lots of areas that we can agree on, but we are not going to agree on these gun questions,” Keene said. “We don’t think, from either a constitutional standpoint or a policy standpoint, it works.”

Biden said on Thursday, however, that the consensus was growing for the background checks for gun buyers and for banning high-capacity ammunition magazines — in a preview of some of the policies he’ll recommend to President Barack Obama early next week.

“There is an emerging set of recommendations — not coming from me, but coming from the groups we’ve met,” Biden said before his session with groups representing hunters and wildlife organizations. “I have a real tight window to do this. The public wants us to act.”

Biden said that he and other administration officials, as they met with gun-control advocates and representatives of victims, repeatedly heard about the need for “near universal background checks” in firearms transactions, greater freedom for federal agencies to conduct research about gun crimes, and limiting the capacity of ammunition magazines.

"There is a surprising — so far — a surprising recurrence of suggestions that we have universal background checks, not just close the gun show loophole but totally universal background checks including private sales," Biden said.

But while Keene told the NRA that “background checks generally are a good thing,” he said there was a broader question surrounding them, since many gun sales are between private owners: “How would you enforce a law that would require me to check you out?”

It could be done at gun shows, Keene said, but the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lacks a system for such checks. “You can talk theoretically, or you can talk about the real world,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean that there isn’t an area for agreement,” Keene added. “If question is: ‘Should we ban guns? Should we ban so-called assault weapons?’ There’s not going to be any agreement there.

“If the question, however, is, ‘How do we deal with the problem of these kinds of shootings?’ then there is an area for agreement.”

As for Keene’s overall take on the Biden session, he said: “We stated our position. They stated their position. Some things you can do by executive order. Some things you can’t do by executive order.

“And some things you do by executive order, you need money for it to be implemented — and that’s up to Congress.”

Bloomberg News contributed to this report.