According to White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, Trump does support improving our background check system in the wake of the Parkland high school shooting last week:
Just In: President Trump is “supportive of efforts to improve” the background check system in the wake of the #ParklandSchoolShooting, the White House tells @CBSNews. pic.twitter.com/qQ9eITtWK0
— errol barnett (@errolbarnett) February 19, 2018
I’m all for improving our background check system as long as our rights aren’t restricted. After all, this former student clearly should not have been able to purchase a gun, especially with what law enforcement knew about him.
But I don’t know how to make that happen logistically either, without having local law enforcement actually performing more background checks. The feds can’t know what’s really going on based on statistics that would be in a background check database. As far as I know Cruz was never arrested, so to the feds he would probably look like someone who should be able to purchase a gun. But local law enforcement would have been able to fill in the gaps if they had to do a background check and I think they might have denied him a purchase permit, if that system existed there.
But I don’t think Florida has a purchase permit system like NC does, and even if they did it probably wouldn’t apply to long guns.
So then the question for me is how Congress can meaningfully improve background checks without damaging someone’s constitutional rights and I’m not sure that’s possible if everything is to be done at the federal level.