Trump calls for quick action on school safety, gun rules

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Congress should act quickly on gun laws as he convened lawmakers at the White House and pushed for tougher background checks, better school safety and more mental health resources to prevent shootings.

“We can’t wait and play games and nothing gets done,” Trump said as he opened the session with 17 House and Senate lawmakers. “We want to stop the problems.”

Trump particularly cited the need for stronger background checks, which have been resisted by Republicans in Congress and the National Rifle Association. But the president said he told NRA officials over lunch recently that changes in gun culture are needed.

“Hey, I’m the biggest fan of the Second Amendment,” Trump said.

“It’s time,” he said he told the NRA officials. “We have to stop this nonsense.”

The White House meeting came amid fresh public debate over gun laws, fueled by student survivors of the massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who have been meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The school reopened Wednesday for the first time since a 19-yearold’s Valentine’s Day assault killed 17.

Momentum on gun legislation has stalled in Congress as Republican leaders showed little interest in pursuing stricter gun control laws and Democrats pushed new restrictions following the Florida shooting.

Sen. Chris Murphy, DConn., told the president that if he backed legislation in Congress to expand background checks, as proposed under a bill twice rejected in the Senate, it would pass.

“It is going to have to be you,” Murphy said.

Ahead of the session, Senate Democrats urged the president to follow through on his call for “comprehensive background checks” by endorsing legislation to extend the pre-purchase reviews to online and gun show sales.

“You said that you would be ‘strongly pushing comprehensive background checks’ in an effort to combat the epidemic of mass shootings that has plagued our country,” wrote the four senators led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., citing Trump’s weekend tweet after the Florida shooting. “We couldn’t agree more.”