President Trump led a freewheeling but civil discussion of an emotionally charged issue and came out looking better for it.
No, not the “listening session” following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre — the immigration meeting with a bipartisan group of senators last month.
Like Wednesday’s discussion of school shootings and gun violence, Trump once held a generally well-received televised discussion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — an Obama executive action shielding from deportation illegal immigrants brought into the United States as minors — and related issues.
Within days, the image of a new, more agreeable Trump had disappeared, canceled out by the firestorm over his alleged reference to immigration from “shithole countries.” There is still no DACA deal as the March 5 deadline for the program’s cancellation by the president fast approaches.
That is the danger for Trump on guns: that he will follow a conversation in which people expressed divergent views on gun control to his face with little concrete action. “It’s not going to be talk like it has been in the past,” the president vowed to Florida school shooting survivors.
But on guns or immigration, it is easier to be bipartisan in word than in deed. The country is bitterly divided on both culturally charged topics. There is a yawning chasm even between those who know a great deal about guns and those who have seldom been exposed to them as anything other than dangerous objects to be feared for their lethality.
While politely listening to calls for gun control, Trump himself mainly proposed arming school employees and cracking down on those who might be dangerously mentally ill.
“We are defending our Second Amendment, and have taken historic actions to protect religious liberty,” Trump said in the State of the Union address.
The gun debate has largely stalled because gun owners, as opposed to the supposedly fearsome “gun lobby,” have more intensity on the issue than those who would pass new laws.
Gun controllers tend to propose “gun safety” legislation involving improved background checks and other things that poll well, while implying that they want to more severely limit private access to firearms. Gun owners, realizing it would be difficult for the U.S. to become Australia without impinging on their Second Amendment rights, fight back accordingly against even modest bills.
The premise is that gun control fails in places like Chicago because it largely does not exist in states like Vermont. Reducing the supply of guns is therefore reasonably seen as attempt at disarming the law-abiding.
Mass shootings upset this calculus because nearly everyone feels at risk. Like terrorism, these events take an emotional toll far greater than their raw numbers. In arguing against this or that ill-conceived anti-terror policy, one might find data showing, say, bathtub drownings to be more common than ISIS slayings. But such an exercise is morally obtuse and misses the point.
The community at the heart of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School seems invested in keeping up the pressure on politicians to act in a way that even the families involved in shootings as horrific as Sandy Hook were ultimately unable to do. Despite the strength of the Bill of Rights and the American gun subculture, it is hard to imagine these incidents being tolerated indefinitely even if the corrective policy tools seem blunt.
It’s a challenge for Trump, who supported a federal assault weapons ban back in 1999 but moved right on guns to win the Republican presidential nomination and eventually the White House. The National Rifle Association, like the Conservative Political Action Conference Trump will speak to Friday, is a rare mainstream conservative organization he actually owes something to.
More importantly, 62 percent of gun owners pulled the lever for Trump in November 2016. They can be an unforgiving constituency, although he did seem to waver during the campaign on allowing gun purchases by Americans on the no-fly list.
At the same time, some of the proposals Trump is flirting with on bump stocks, mental health screening, and background checks could conceivably bolster his position ahead of the midterm elections. They might also allow him to look bipartisan and even triangulate against some of the Republicans in Congress, Bill Clinton-style.
In the aftermath of another deadly shooting, how long can Trump hold the line?
