GUNS/LEGISLATION/MASS SHOOTINGS/NRA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “In 2013, Donald J. Trump said he supported background checks for gun purchases to ‘weed out the sickos.’ Two years later, as he prepared to run for president, he flip-flopped, telling Ammoland magazine that he opposed expanded checks because they don’t work. It is a recurring pattern. As president, Mr. Trump changed his mind again in 2018 after the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., insisting that stronger checks would be ‘fully backed’ by the White House. But that position only lasted a few days, until a late-night meeting with the National Rifle Association in the Oval Office, after which he backed off his support and later threatened to veto a background check bill. On Friday, in the wake of massacres in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, Mr. Trump presented himself now as a deal-maker eager to bring Democrats and Republicans together behind tougher background checks. But the president’s long history on the gun issue raises questions about his real commitment to legislation that would improve the background check system and close loopholes that have allowed firearms to be bought and sold at gun shows without any knowledge of a buyer’s history.”
–Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Past Flip-Flops Cloud Trump’s Position on Background Checks,” The New York Times online, August 9, 2019