President Trump found himself in a familiar place on Friday: imploring his colleagues in government to do something to prevent another shooter from taking the lives of American schoolchildren.
Just after 7:30 a.m. local time Friday morning, a 17-year-old student of Sante Fe High School in Southeast Texas entered the building with a shotgun and a .38 revolver. The gunman, whom law enforcement identified as 11th grader Dimitrios Pagourtzis, killed nine of his peers and one student, and caused serious injuries to several others. Police and FBI officials later discovered several homemade explosive devices at Pagourtzis’ home.
The alleged shooter was arrested Friday, almost three months to the day since 17 people were killed by a 19-year-old gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
“This has been going on too long in our country,” Trump declared during a White House event Friday afternoon. “Everyone must work together at every level of government to keep our children safe.”
In the coming days, the president and his aides will likely have to decide whether they will pursue a different course of action this time around.
“He’s right: This cannot continue to happen,” a Republican close to the White House told the Washington Examiner, echoing the president’s remarks from earlier Friday,
“I applauded [Trump] in February for hosting the roundtable [with congressional Republicans and Democrats] and giving the Parkland victims a chance to share their thoughts, but now we actually need to see some movement,” this person said.
Just days after a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas student charged the campus with an AR-15, killing more than a dozen of his peers, the White House hosted a listening session with survivors of the shooting and the grieving parents of some of the victims. Trump assured attendees that he would be “very strong on background checks” and was also looking “very strongly” into arming teachers at public schools.
“I want to listen, and then after I listen, we’re going to get things done,” he said at the time.
Six days later, the president welcomed congressional Democrats and Republicans to the White House for wide-ranging meeting on gun control measures and school safety. For more than an hour, he bounced ideas off lawmakers seated around the table, including raising the purchasing age for certain firearms, regulating devices known as bump stocks, which increase the firing capacity on semi-automatic weapons, strengthening background checks, and offering paid bonuses to teachers who undergo gun training and agree to conceal carry in their classrooms.
“I am the biggest fan of the Second Amendment. I am a big fan of the [National Rifle Association],” Trump assured other NRA-backed Republicans during the Feb. 28 meeting. “I had lunch with them on Sunday and I said, ‘It’s time, we’re going to stop this nonsense this time.’”
Both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence attended the NRA’s annual legislative conference in Dallas earlier this month, a move that drew heavy criticism from gun control proponents. Many pointed to a comment the president made to Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., in that same meeting, when the Pennsylvania Republican said a gun-related bill he proposed in 2013 would not raise the age of gun purchases from 18 to 21.
“Because you’re afraid of the NRA, right?” Trump had said bluntly.
In between the Parkland shooting and Friday’s massacre in Texas, the Justice Department submitted a notice to the Office of Management and Budget to clarify the definition of “machine gun” so as to prohibit Americans from buying, selling, or manufacturing bump stock-type devices. The House later passed a bill that would allow the federal government to spend $50 to $75 million each year for the next decade on safety training and school security. The legislation has yet to be taken up by the Senate, and no other measures were taken by the administration or Congress over that same period.
Former White House communications aide and Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn placed the blame solely on Capitol Hill in the weeks after the Parkland shooting occurred, wondering in a column why state legislatures and U.S. companies had taken action but Washington had not.
“The people we elect to Congress have to understand that they work for us, not the other way around. I hope that members of Congress see the steps taken by businesses, hear the concerns from their voters and get to work on full scale legislation that will prevent another attack like the one in Parkland, Florida,” Epshteyn wrote in mid-March.
Meanwhile, others have said the onus is on Trump to “do something” in order to prevent future gun violence on school campuses across the U.S. Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for example, penned an open letter to the president in which he asked, “How many more innocent people have to die before you act?”
“You were elected to lead — do something. Your first responsibility is to the people of this country, not the NRA — do something. My heart breaks for the families who have to grieve from this needless violence — DO SOMETHING,” Cuomo wrote.
The White House did not return a request for comment about the president’s schedule next week, and whether he might reconvene the same group of bipartisan lawmakers to discuss potential actions that can be taken.
