Even for a man who changes his policy views as often as most people change their socks, President Donald Trump’s weekend roundabout on the guns and schools was head-spinning.
On Sunday evening, a White House official held a conference call with reporters that repudiated what White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah had said hours earlier about what the age limit for purchasing rifles should be. Shah had said the “president has been clear that he does support raising the age to 21.”
But on the conference call, the White House official said Trump would not be supporting raising the age limit. Instead he would be doing what on Feb. 28 he had accused congressional Republicans of doing: caving in to the National Rifle Association.
Furthermore, the White House announced Education Secretary Betsy DeVos would be chairing a blue-ribbon commission to study issues of guns and violence in schools, including age limits. This was less than 24 hours after Trump, at a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania, had said, “We can’t just keep setting up blue-ribbon committees,” adding that all they did was “talk, talk, talk. Two hours later, then they write a report.”
Trump has been ricocheting on the guns-in-schools issues ever since a Feb. 14 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., took 17 lives. At a remarkable television session with members of Congress on Feb. 28, he directly challenged NRA orthodoxy by calling for comprehensive gun control legislation.
He supported closing the loophole that exempts purchasers of guns bought at gun shows and on the internet from federal background checks. He said an assault weapons ban was worth talking about. He wanted to give police the right to seize guns from people who could pose a danger. “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” he said.
The NRA quickly sent officials to the White House to get Trump back in line. The result was the set of proposals that emerged Sunday, which calls for federal spending to help states train school staff in firearms use, allow military veterans and retired police officers to work as school safety officers, support for a watered-down bill to improve background checks, a call to states to allow judges to approve seizing weapons from people who pose a “red-flag” threat to themselves or others and a ban on bump stock devices.
There are some good ideas in there, but without full-throated, coherent and consistent advocacy from the president, most of them will go nowhere. If there’s one thing America has learned about Trump in the past 14 months, it’s that while he might do full-throated, he doesn’t do consistent or coherent.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
