In the past week, Donald Trump has staked out two wildly different stances on gun control: He has publicly appeared to back the Democrats’ top gun control initiative in Congress while at the same time endorsing the possession of concealed weapons among people drinking alcohol in bars and nightclubs—a position to the right of the National Rifle Association.
Trump first teased a meeting with the NRA last week, in which he tweeted that the two parties would discuss “not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.” The announcement was vague enough to leave his stance open to interpretation. Did he back the amendment sponsored by Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, which is an outright prohibition for individuals named in the government’s secret record? Or was he merely expressing support for Republican senator John Cornyn’s NRA-backed alternative: a measure that would institute a 72-hour hold for any person on the list trying to buy a gun and provide federal investigators time to establish probable cause that the individual was involved in plotting terrorism?
The NRA claimed Sunday that Trump is on the same page with them, but Trump has given no indication that he opposes the Democrats’ gun control measure. In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl that aired Sunday, Trump said he “understand[s]” the NRA’s concerns, but he never expressed opposition to the Feinstein amendment or support for the Cornyn amendment. All we heard was hedging: He said he’d “like to see” those on the watch list banned from purchasing a firearm, but he also acknowledged the legitimacy of those arguing that “it could be that people are on [the list] that shouldn’t be on.” The bottom line, he said, is that “we have to make sure that people that are terrorists or have even an inclination toward terrorism cannot buy weapons, guns.”
His campaign has not responded to requests for clarification from THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
In a reflection of just how much the candidate’s positions seem to fly off his cuff, he went hard to the right during a Friday rally during which he said it’d have been a “beautiful thing” for the Orlando nightclub goers to have been armed when shooter Omar Mateen entered and opened fire.
“If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here, right to their waist, or right to their ankle, and this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting, and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes boom, boom, you know what? That would’ve been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks,” Trump said in Houston.
NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre—typically the sworn enemy of gun control activists—implied over the weekend that Trump’s statement went too far. “I don’t think you should have firearms where people are drinking,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
The head of the association’s lobbying arm, Christopher Cox, added during an interview with ABC’s This Week that “no one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms,” while also arguing that Trump was trying to make a more “common sense” point.
“What Donald Trump has said is what the American people know is common sense, that if somebody had been there to stop this faster, fewer people would have died. That’s not controversial, that’s common sense,” Cox said.
Trump agreed in a tweet Monday morning: “When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees.”
Obvious or not, the only thing clear about Trump’s agenda is that it has no unifying ideology. His recent stances on gun rights—and, by extension, due process—are the latest example. He finds himself to the left of the recent Republican mainstream, a platform approximating that of Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan, on entitlement reform, international trade, guns, property rights, and issues pertaining to foreign policy. For all his vows to repeal Obamacare, he has listed health care as one of the federal government’s three main responsibilities. On the opposite side of the spectrum, he bungled an answer on abortion that wouldn’t register with even the most strict pro-life voters—quite an achievement for a public figure who once said he was “pro-choice in every respect.”
In a revealing and perhaps explanatory statement, Trump once said he fashioned himself a conservative, but only “somewhat” of one.
“When you get down to it, I am a conservative person. I am by nature a somewhat conservative person,” he said last year before his campaign had taken flight. “I never looked at putting a label on myself, because frankly putting a label on myself, it didn’t matter.”
Given the evolution of his beliefs, nor does it now.
