Trump vows to end years of gridlock on response to mass shootings.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump vowed on Monday to end years of gridlock in responding to mass shootings by getting tough with the National Rifle Association and with Congress, yet he already confronts familiar barriers that could thwart action once more.
That includes his own policy moves. Even as Trump urged governors at a White House meeting to confront the NRA, he promoted proposals that the gun-rights group likes, including arming teachers, and said nothing about his previous idea to raise the minimum age for long-gun buyers to 21, which the NRA opposes.
Over the weekend, the president divulged, he’d had lunch with NRA leaders including Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. “These guys are great patriots,” Trump told the governors. “They’re great people and they want to do something.”
Though Trump earlier had called for legislative action this week, with Congress returning from a break, momentum already is bogging down in part because of the president’s own unpredictability on questions of gun control. In the nearly two weeks since the shootings in Parkland, Fla., he has made policy on the fly in front of television cameras, revealing the fluidity of his thinking as well as the influence of the NRA. Also, many lawmakers facing difficult midterm elections this year seem in no hurry to stake out positions on the long-contentious topic. Officials on Capitol Hill suggested that no substantial gun measures are on tap for the short term.
Trump’s idea for arming some school personnel has gotten little support among lawmakers or governors of either party. Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington state, a Democrat, told Trump that neither teachers nor many local lawenforcement officials favor the idea, and added, “I just suggest we need a little less tweeting here and a little more listening.”
Trump’s meeting with about three dozen governors was his third “listening session” since a gunman killed 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
More emphatically than he has before, Trump vowed to use his own authority to ban bump stocks, the devices used to make legal semiautomatic guns fire more like illegal automatic weapons. The president first raised the idea in October, after a gunman in Las Vegas used bump-stock equipped rifles to kill 58 concertgoers, but then the administration dropped it.
Though the Parkland shooter apparently didn’t use a bump stock, Trump has revived the idea of banning them by federal regulation.
The NRA has said it could support a bump stock ban by regulation, as Trump proposes, but not a new law. The regulatory route suggests a quandary: The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has said in the past that, without a new law, it doesn’t have the power to ban bump stocks. Also, gun manufacturers likely would sue to contest such a regulatory ban.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump plans to meet with lawmakers Wednesday to talk about gun policy and insisted that he isn’t backing away from any of his ideas, including the one to set a minimum age of 21 for longgun purchases.
Still, Republican lawmakers worry that Trump might eventually switch positions and leave them exposed to the wrath of the NRA and its highly motivated voters.
The gun debate is exploding just as party primaries are looming, a time in which incumbents are reluctant to alienate their party’s most loyal supporters — which in the case of Republicans includes a large swath of gun owners. New polling suggests that Americans are more in favor of gun restrictions since the Florida shooting, but progun sentiment remains high among Republicans voters.
Several measures are circulating in Congress, prompted by past gun massacres. The House earlier passed a bill that would eliminate some loopholes in the federal background check system. But Democrats opposed that measure because it would also allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons across state lines, including into states where it’s illegal.
A bipartisan Senate version of the background checks bill, sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican, and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, doesn’t include the concealed weapons language. Written in response to a mass shooting last November in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the measure seeks to get state and federal agencies to be more rigorous in forwarding any incriminating records involving prospective gun buyers.
After the Sutherland Springs shooting, it was found that the Air Force failed to send information to the federal database about a domestic abuse conviction against the shooter, which could have blocked his weapons purchase.
Even if the Senate passed its version, without the expansion of “concealed carry” across state lines, gun rights advocates say Republican leaders promised it would be tabled in the House, said Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for the group Gun Owners of America.
In a statement Monday, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said that if congressional action is limited to tightening the background check system, “it would be an abject failure and a dereliction of our duty.”