President Trump will spend Wednesday and Thursday meeting with people who have firsthand experience coping with mass shootings, a move that underscores his administration’s newfound push for policy solutions for the problem of gun violence.
The White House has faced surging levels of activism in the days since 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, a troubled teen with a well-documented history of threatening behavior, gunned down 17 of his former classmates and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Students who survived the massacre have since implored legislators to take action and have demanded that Trump lead the effort.
“President Trump, Barron goes to school, so let’s protect all these other kids here in Parkland … and everywhere else in the United States of America,” Lori Alhadeff said in an emotional interview on CNN, invoking the president’s 11-year-old son. Alhadeff’s 14-year-old daughter was killed in the shooting last week.
“We need security now for all these children that have to go to school. We need action, action, action,” Alhadeff demanded.
Days after Alhadeff buried her daughter, hundreds of teenage students marched to the White House to deliver their own message to Trump. There, the youth activists staged a “lie-in” for three minutes — the amount of time Cruz spent roaming the halls of Stoneman Douglas High with his AR-15 rifle.
“It’s really important to express our anger and the importance of finally trying to make a change and having gun control in America,” Ella Fesler, 16, told NBC News at the protest. “Every day when I say bye to my parents, I do acknowledge the fact that I could never see my parents again.”
A Republican close to the White House said the student-led outcry has “had a tremendous impact on President Trump,” who visited with victims of the shooting last Friday and will host a listening session this week with students and parents who have been impacted by the Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Columbine shootings.
“Obviously, the president was moved by the situation in Florida,” said veteran GOP strategist Ford O’Connell. “He also ran as a public safety, law-and-order president, so this is unacceptable under his watch.”
O’Connell attributed Trump’s softer language on gun control to “this specific tragedy, but also the overall promise he made in his campaign to the American people.” He said the White House “wants to do something concrete” this time around.
The White House has been working with Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, in the days since the Parkland shooting to determine whether there is a viable path forward for a bill that would improve the federal background check system. Cornyn unveiled the measure last November with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and though similar language has already passed the House, the legislation has stalled in the Senate.
Proponents of the bill claim it would have prevented a gunman in Texas, who had been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force, from purchasing the weapon he used to kill 26 parishioners at a church in Sutherland Springs last November.
“President Trump wants to strengthen the background check system, that way all relevant information is given to all authorities that are going to then run background checks,” White House officials wrote in a document distributed to allies on Tuesday morning, and later obtained by the Washington Examiner.
On Tuesday, Trump directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to begin writing regulations that would ban so-called “bump stocks” and similar devices that are used to increase the firing rate on semi-automatic guns. He delivered the directive during a medal ceremony for law enforcement officials, telling attendees, “We must do more to protect our children.”
The president is also looking into ways to improve information-sharing between local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, a response to widespread frustration over the way police and FBI officials handled several complaints they had received about Cruz in the weeks leading up to his rampage.
“One of the things we always hear is ‘see something, say something.’ In this particular instance, and those in the past, people saw something, people said something, but nobody did anything,” said the White House document. “We have to have a better system of communicating red flags across law enforcement and across the background check system so these types of people with mental illnesses, with evil in their heart cannot get weapons.”
In addition to local police, who responded to dozens of calls from concerned neighbors and school administrators about the Parkland shooter, the FBI admitted in a statement last week that the agency received a tip in January about Cruz, his gun ownership, and “the potential of him conducting a school shooting.” The bureau said typical “protocols were not followed” and no investigation was conducted after the tip was received.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders confirmed on Tuesday that an internal investigation has been launched at the top law enforcement agency, while defending Trump over his claim that agents were too preoccupied with the Russia probe to properly handle the information about Cruz.
“We all have to be aware that the cause of this was a deranged individual that made the decision to take the lives of 17 other people,” she said. “[Trump] was making the point that we would like our FBI agents to not be focused on something that is clearly a hoax.”
It’s not yet clear whether Trump’s policy moves will satisfy his critics, who say he is still beholden to pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association.
“If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association,” Emma Gonzalez, a student at Stoneman Douglas, told reporters last week.
Besides the NRA, Trump’s supporters have largely forced him to walk a fine line on gun control. The popular polling firm SurveyMonkey published a pair of maps after the Las Vegas shooting last October depicting the electoral maps based on voters who said they kept a firearm in their home and those who do not. With the exception of Vermont, voters who said they live in households with guns backed Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton 63 to 31 percent in the 2016 election.
Trump himself has labeled the Second Amendment “America’s First Freedom” and regularly promised to avoid any actions that would curtail gun ownership in America. Nevertheless, some Republicans close to the White House have said the passage of bipartisan gun legislation could be politically advantageous for the party in a midterm year.
“With background checks and the Second Amendment, it always comes out as an R versus D situation. But it’s really more of an urban versus rural situation,” said O’Connell. “If you look at some of these key areas, like in Nevada, you’re not seeing the Democrat go nuts or pulling guns out of people’s hands. So this is going to be more of a regional, rural-urban solution, I think.”
