U.S. President Donald Trump is supporting efforts to tighten federal background checks on gun buyers in the aftermath of last week’s shooting massacre of 17 people at a Florida high school, the White House said Monday.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump spoke last week with Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn about his bipartisan legislation with Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, a long-time anti-gun advocate, to improve compliance with background checks. The revisions are still being negotiated.
Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old police say has confessed to gunning down 14 students and three adults at the Parkland, Florida, high school school he was expelled from last year, was able to buy an assault-style AR-15 rifle to carry out the mayhem after clearing a background check.
In Washington, Democratic lawmakers often call for tighter controls on gun purchases, while Republicans often oppose them, saying they would violate the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines gun ownership. The Cornyn-Murphy legislation has drawn support from Democrats and Republicans, although passage of gun legislation has often stalled in the politically fractious Congress.
NRA support
The measure would not impose new restrictions on gun purchases, but rather attempt to make sure that information about mental-health and criminal-conviction records that legally bar individuals from buying weapons is consistently sent to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. In the recent past, U.S. authorities have frequently learned after someone has carried out a shooting rampage that they should not have been allowed to buy a weapon because of mental health issues or a criminal conviction, but the information was never forwarded to the national database.
Unlike many gun control proposals, the National Rifle Association, the dominant gun lobby in the U.S., supports improving the background check system. The legislation calls for a system of incentives and penalties to encourage government entities throughout the United States to report information about people with mental health issues or criminal backgrounds.
There was one significant misstep in monitoring Cruz’s behavior. The FBI admitted it did not act on a tip on January 5 about him, when someone with a close relationship to Cruz called in with information about the teenager’s “gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.”
Student demands
Survivors of last week’s massacre said they are planning a march on Washington and other major U.S. cities next month to demand tangible action from lawmakers to try to prevent future school shootings.
“We are going to be marching together as students, begging for our lives,” student Cameron Kasey told ABC television’s This Week broadcast Sunday. “This has happened before and change hasn’t come. This is it.”
WATCH: Student protest in front of White House
Kasey said one of the reasons for the march is to pin “a badge of shame” on any politician who is accepting money from the National Rifle Association. She said the NRA is promoting a gun culture that leads to such horrors.
Another student, Emma Gonzalez, told ABC that Trump, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Florida Governor Rick Scott all have NRA support. She said students “want to give them the opportunity to be on the right side of this.” In an interview on CNN, she said, “If they accept this blood money, they are against the children…you’re either funding the killers, or you’re standing with the children.”
Meanwhile, Rubio, a Republican, threw his support Sunday behind a Democratic-sponsored state bill that would let courts allow police to seize guns from those who are determined to be a danger to others. Rubio told a Florida television station the law might have prevented the school massacre.
California already has such a law. But gun rights advocates oppose it, saying it would take away guns from those who are innocent of any crimes.
Several U.S. lawmakers are calling for stiffer background checks of gun buyers, but Congress has shown no inclination to stop the sale of assault weapons, even as national polls in the U.S. show widespread support among voters for such a ban.
Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma told NBC’s Meet the Press, “I have no issue with more background checks. All the warning signs were there” about Cruz’s mental state and intentions.
“The tragedy we saw in Parkland is unthinkable,” Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, told the same show. He said the loophole that allows 40 percent of guns sold in the U.S. to occur without background checks needs to be closed.
Those who oppose stricter gun control agree with Trump the best way to prevent future mass killings is to provide improved mental health care when warning signs surface about potentially violent individuals intent on carrying out a shooting attack.
They say there is no way someone with a troubled past like Cruz, who talked about plans to buy a gun, was expelled from the Parkland school for causing trouble, and even talked about becoming a school shooter should have been allowed to get his hands on a weapon like the AR-15 he purchased.
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