Trump today told the press a little while ago that he’s “all in favor” of doing background checks in response to the mass shootings, when asked what he could support:
Trump says he wants to ‘do background checks’, but honestly I am not sure exactly what that means. We already have background checks when you purchase a firearm, whether at a gun show or a licensed firearm dealer. So to use Trump’s verbiage, we are already doing them.
Now if he means strengthening background checks from a mental health perspective or from a specific pattern of arrests maybe, that’s one thing. But if he means forcing background checks on private sales, that’s another. And the latter will be a big fat loser for him if he tries to push for that.
The bottom line for me is that I’m not going to get all bent out of shape over Trump’s vague language on background checks. There just aren’t enough specifics to make assumptions at this point. I’ll wait until we have some facts and then we can praise or criticize him.
I know he also mentioned this week that he’s interested in potentially doing red flag laws and there are reports that he’s working with AG Barr on this. Now here again, I don’t know exactly what this would look like so I don’t want to just make assumptions. Perhaps there’s a reasonable way to do this that wouldn’t infringe on someone’s rights? Again, I’d rather wait for the facts before jumping to conclusions.