Two weeks ago today, Donald Trump said there was a “great appetite” for background checks for gun purchases. But then he reportedly spoke by phone with Wayne LaPierre, the chieftain of the National Rifle Association, and that spurred him to retreat on background checks and to mumble about a “slippery slope” of taking away gun rights. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that the nation has “very, very strong background checks right now, but we have, sort of, missing areas, areas that don't complete the whole circle. And we're looking at different things, and I have to tell you that it is a mental problem." Murky. But a retreat nonetheless.
And then, on Wednesday, when queried about his apparent change of stance in light of the reported conversation with LaPierre, Trump told reporters on the South Lawn:
“I didn't say anything about that. We had a great talk with Wayne yesterday. Didn’t say anything about that. We just talked about concepts. Wayne agrees things have to be done also,” Trump told reporters Wednesday as he left the White House.
“We have background checks, but there are loopholes in the background checks. That’s what I spoke to the NRA about yesterday,” he argued. “They want to get rid of the loopholes as well as I do. At the same time, I don’t want to take away people’s Second Amendment rights.”
Is he now hedging his hedges? This isn’t the first time Trump has spoken words that seem to support gun-law reform only to do absolutely nothing to make reform happen. If it were anybody else, it would be tempting to call this waffling. But with Trump, it’s hard to tell if it’s waffling or calculated or just that he can’t remember what he said previously.
When it comes to federal gun-law reform, talk about licensing owners, registering firearms, banning assault weapons, raising taxes on guns and ammunition, requiring liability insurance for gun-owners, taking guns away from the perpetrators of domestic violence—or from people who have threatened slaughter—runs into a wall of seemingly impenetrable resistance. The percentages vary depending on the proposal, but a large number of people come down on each side of those ideas. Ferocious arguments arise around all of them.
But in one case—universal background checks for all purchases of firearms—Americans are pretty much of one mind. For more than 20 years, every poll on the subject has shown that 84% to 94% of respondents approve of extending existing background checks to every purchase or other transfer of guns. A majority of gun owners support this. A majority of Republicans support it. Even a majority of NRA members support it. The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll puts the populace right in the middle of decades of polling: 89% in favor.
But the 11% keeps winning. The 11% keeps shooting down the obviously necessary and, face it, most modest of serious gun-law reforms. That’s because too many members of Congress are obedient to the agenda of the NRA, an agenda that among other things over the past 30 years has produced an America where in thousands of places a person of ill intent can show up at a concert or a political rally openly slung with a semi-auto rifle capable of putting a hundred rounds a minute into the crowd. Bad guy? Good guy? Nobody knows until the shooting starts.
In the wake of the latest pair of mass slaughters, with gun-law reformers, including several Democratic presidential candidates and reform organizations of long-standing bolstered in their efforts by an influx of young activist voices, Donald Trump has a chance, for once, to show some brains and just a smidgen of courage by taking the right side on probably the only political matter you could ever get 89% of 21st century Americans to agree on. So very, very easy to make the right decision. To call up Mitch McConnell and tell him to get behind universal background checks.
At first, but only to the stubbornly naive, it appeared Trump was going to do exactly that. Murky, to be sure. But if you didn’t know Trump you’d be excused for thinking this to be reason for optimism. It obviously wasn’t. Tuesday came the reversal. And then today’s claim that there was no reversal. Who knows what's true with this guy? Is that “great appetite” for background checks, like so much of what he says, pretense, a promise he figured would disappear amid the distractions and chaos of the 24/7 news cycle?
If there’s anything that would move McConnell to allow a Senate vote on the universal background check legislation that has already passed the House of Representatives, it would be for Trump and whoever passes for moderate Republicans these days to put the pressure on him. And even then, the filibuster would remain a big hurdle to overcome.
This fact shouldn’t, however, mean giving up on gun-reform legislation until January 2020. This time around, unlike in the past, voting against a background check bill could pose enough of a problem for incumbents in some suburban districts now represented by Republicans that they decide to brush off the NRA. Come next year, a vote against universal background checks seems likely to make at least some of the naysayers more vulnerable at the polls.