GUNS/NRA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP POSITION CHANGES: “President Donald Trump’s calls for changes to gun laws in the wake of last week’s Florida school shooting push Congress toward a new politically fraught debate just months before the midterm elections.
For more than a decade, and after multiple attacks on students, lawmakers have shied from making any significant changes to gun legislation in part because of the influence of the National Rifle Association. The NRA not only donates large amounts of campaign cash, mostly to Republicans, but its scorecards on politicians’ pro-gun-rights positions are often the sole driver of the votes of many of its members.
Mr. Trump said ‘hardened’ school security would be central to stopping future shootings, which echoes the NRA position, while he also floated proposals to keep weapons out of the hands of young people and the mentally ill.
Speaking Thursday [2-22-18] with state and local officials at a White House meeting about school safety, Mr. Trump said students should be protected the way banks are. He repeated his call for arming teachers to help protect students, both as a deterrent and to provide a quicker response, but he said that only highly trained people would carry weapons in school…
Mr. Trump ran on a gun-rights platform, but a few of his proposals mark a modest step toward gun-control advocates. On Thursday, he reiterated his proposals to improve gun-purchaser background checks, limit access to firearms by people with mental illnesses and ban devices that allow certain firearms to mimic automatic weapons. He also called for raising the minimum age for some gun purchases to 21.”
-Julie Bykowicz, Kristina Peterson, and Peter Nicholas, “Trump’s Stance on Guns Puts Pressure on Congress,” The Wall Street Journal online, Feb. 22, 2018 07:33pm