Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump under the gun on guns
Post-Vegas, he faces new pressure to act, albeit in limited way
President in quandary after the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
WASHINGTON — The pro-gun community had reason to be suspicious of Donald Trump.
He wrote in favor of an assault weapons ban and a “slightly longer” waiting period before gun purchases in a 2000 book, and accused Republicans of walking “the NRA line.”
Even as he rebranded himself a “2nd Amendment maven” in 2013, he sounded conflicted, suggesting he favored expanded background checks.
No one on either side of the gun debate seems to know exactly when or why Trump shifted. But they agree that the mogul from Manhattan has become one of the most forceful pro-gun presidents in decades.
Now, after the worst mass shooting in modern American history, Trump faces a gut-check moment. He could not have imagined that within his first year as president he would come under pressure, even from within his typically pro-gun party, to support legislation restricting gun use, however limited — in this case, a ban on so-called bump-fire stocks like the Las Vegas shooter used, which turn semiautomatic weapons into virtual machine guns.
White House officials, both privately and publicly, insist he is not likely to endorse fundamental change such as broader gun controls.
And the gun lobby is watching.
“When a crisis happens you can really tell who your friends are,” said Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights, which advertises itself as more hard-line than the National Rifle Association.
For decades, as he flirted with presidential runs, Trump tried to stake a position between what he called, in 2000, “the extremes of the two existing major parties.”
In his book that year, “The America We Deserve,” Trump accused Democrats of trying to confiscate all guns and Republicans of refusing even limited restrictions because of the NRA’s hold on the party.
In a four-paragraph section on guns, Trump wrote that he supported President Bill Clinton’s assault-weapons ban along with a brief waiting period for gun buyers.
In a 1989 interview on MSNBC, Trump seemed even more ambivalent about gun rights.
Saying he owned “a couple of guns,” he added that he would be “all for” a total ban — if “you could take the guns away from the bad guys.”
Trump had not renounced those positions as late as 2013, when he told radio host Howard Stern that the focus should be on gun purchasers’ medical problems and past records.
That ambivalence vanished when Trump ran for president and tried to distinguish himself in a crowded GOP primary.
“Opponents of gun rights try to come up with scarysounding phrases like ‘assault weapons,’ ‘militarystyle weapons’ and ‘highcapacity magazines’ to confuse people,” Trump said in a campaign position paper. “Law-abiding people should be allowed to own the firearm of their choice. The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own.”
The NRA helped to elect Trump, spending more than $30 million and endorsing him at a point in the campaign when many Republicans were still reluctant to support him.
Trump returned the favor with some of the strongest pro-gun rhetoric ever delivered by a presidential candidate. He told an NRA audience that Democratic rival Hillary Clinton wanted to destroy the Second Amendment and that terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino would have been stopped if more victims were armed.
He said of the Paris attackers in the 2015 incident: “If you would have had guns on the other side, I promise there wouldn’t have been 130 people killed.”
He endorsed a national right to carry and promised, on his first day in office, to eliminate restrictions on bringing guns within 1,000 feet of primary and secondary schools.
Trump failed to overturn the federal gun-free-zone law, an action that requires Congress to pass repeal legislation. Yet he has pleased the gun lobby since taking office.
In February, the president signed into law a measure overturning an Obama administration rule that would have denied gun access to about 75,000 Social Security beneficiaries per year who had been declared both incapable of handling their own affairs and mentally incompetent.
Gun groups are hoping for more, including measures in Congress that would make it easier to buy silencers and for veterans deemed mentally incompetent to carry a firearm.
Kris Brown, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, says of the NRA: “I suppose ... having put all of their money into candidate Trump, they’re expecting that he’s bought and paid for.”
Yet Brown and others are hoping Trump will shift again.
After the Las Vegas attack, Trump echoed rhetoric that the NRA and often uses following mass shootings, saying it was too soon to talk about gun policy. But he and his administration dropped hints that he might be open to discussion in time.
“We’ll talk about gun laws as time goes by,” Trump said on Tuesday.
A White House official said that Trump was most likely to back gun narrow measures.
At the National Association for Gun Rights, Dudley Brown said he is fighting to make sure Trump doesn’t act. But he’s not especially worried.
“There certainly was some question about his history,” he said. But, Brown added, “This administration has done much better than we thought.”