As 2017 got underway, Republicans had something they weren’t accustomed to having: For the first time in more than a decade, the GOP controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. The question wasn’t whether the party and its leaders would pursue an ambitious agenda, it was which issue Republicans would prioritize first.
Though the details have been largely forgotten, the first substantive policy approved by the GOP-led Congress and signed into law by Donald Trump in early 2017 was, of all things, a gun bill. Republicans made it easier for those with severe mental illnesses, to the point that they receive disability benefits through the Social Security Administration, to purchase firearms legally.
Nearly a decade later, the party again holds the levers of federal power, and while Congress hasn’t acted on any major gun legislation, the president and his administration have taken a series of regulatory steps, including some related to the same issue the GOP prioritized during the opening weeks of Trump’s first term. The New York Times reported:
The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions. […]
Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.
In the wake of many horrific mass shootings, it’s not uncommon to hear prominent voices on the right argue that the deadly gun violence has nothing to do with access to firearms and everything to do with mental health.
And yet, here we are.
The Times’ report added, “One proposed change allowing more people with a history of mental illness to have a gun would mean that the public safety risk could range from minimal to considerably greater, ‘up to and including potential mass casualty events,’” according to a cost analysis by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (better known as ATF), which is responsible for enforcing federal gun laws.
When thinking about the differences between the president’s first term and his second, this issue is high on the list. As I noted in my first book (see Chapter 8), it was in the wake of a school shooting in February 2018 that Trump held an hourlong televised discussion with a group of lawmakers from both parties about gun violence. As part of the conversation, then-Vice President Mike Pence raised the prospect of empowering law enforcement to take weapons away from those who had been reported as potentially dangerous, although he added that he expected to see “due process so no one’s rights are trampled.”
“Take the firearms first and then go to court,” Trump interjected. At the same event, the president endorsed a law enforcement model in which police officers confiscated some Americans’ guns “whether they had the right or not.”
Republicans derailed those negotiations and nothing passed, but a year later, Trump nevertheless again advocated a gun bill that included restrictions on assault rifles that, according to multiple accounts, was one of his long-sought goals.
In other words, as recently as his first term, the president at least briefly sought ambitious gun reforms, up to and including extrajudicial gun confiscations. In his second term, the Republican and his administration have moved aggressively in the opposite direction.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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