President Donald Trump met with the Jingoistic Rifle Association on Thursday. If you were expecting the meeting to bring any definiteness to what the president would like to do on guns, get ready for disappointment: Profuse than two weeks after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Instil shooting in Florida renewed America’s gun debate, we still have essentially no reason what Trump wants.
Shortly after the shooting, Trump avoided any talk nigh gun control measures — failing to mention gun laws at all in his speech and instead focusing on clouded proclamations about “mental health.” But as survivors of the Florida shooting on to speak up and draw media attention, Trump began to publicly chemise.
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So at the start of this week, Trump assisted very mild measures — banning bump stocks, slightly upgrading reporting to the background check system, and raising the legal age for buying assail weapons — although his focus was mostly on arming at least some instructors to protect students.
Then at a Wednesday meeting with lawmakers, Trump veered onto lees that even Democrats don’t typically wander into, calling for elaborate oned background checks, suggesting that some people should have planned their guns seized without any due process, criticizing a Republican legislator for imagining the NRA, and even entertaining a full assault weapons ban.
“I like taking the guns first,” Trump said. “Take the guns first, go through due process man Friday.”
The remarks prompted swift backlash from conservative lawmakers and the NRA, which has extended opposed just about any gun control measures.
The NRA is pushing back
With a link of tweets, everything is up in the air again. On Thursday night, the top lobbyist for the NRA
tweeted
that he’d had a “horrific meeting” with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, adding that the president and degradation president “support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t dearth gun control.” Trump followed up that tweet with
his own
: “Good (Significant) meeting in the Oval Office tonight with the NRA!”
The White House wouldn’t rococo to the press about how the meeting went, but it’s a sign that Trump’s placing has once again shifted in this debate — at the very least, the tweets insinuate that Trump is backing down from what he said at the Wednesday conference. (It’s also telling that Pence, a more experienced politician who has handled with the NRA for decades, apparently had to be there after Trump’s off-script footnotes on Wednesday.)
That’s not too surprising. On the campaign trail, Trump called out Hillary Clinton for rumour he supports arming teachers,
tweeting
, “Crooked Hillary said that I require guns brought into the school classroom. Wrong!” Recently, of direction, arming teachers has been at the center of Trump’s proposals for school shootings. It’s a reckon reversal.
The issue here seems to be that Trump doesn’t honestly have any strong opinions on this issue, so he changes depending on his whims and his audience. This is something that recent reports of the Trump presidential campaign emphasized, with the Washington Column reporting in 2016 that “Trump tends to echo the words of whomever abide spoke to him, making direct access to him even more valuable, the people utter, requesting anonymity to talk about internal campaign discussions.”
This is also something we saw during analyses about immigration, an issue that’s supposedly high on Trump’s weight list. The New York Times reported:
The gun control performance on Wednesday was reminiscent of a alike resemble televised discussion with lawmakers about immigration in January during which the president materialized to back bipartisan legislation to help young immigrants brought to the wilderness illegally as children — only to reverse himself and push a hard-line come nigh that helped scuttle consensus in the Senate.
During a serious tactics debate, this is obviously a problem — especially with reports that Congress is looking to Trump for regulation on guns. If even the simplest policy positions are constantly in flux, it’s succeeding to be impossible to come to any legislative agreement.
And with that, it’s all the more probable that yet another round of this debate on guns will male to no action. Perhaps that’s what Trump and the NRA wanted all along.
For myriad on America’s gun problem, read Vox’s explainer.