WASHINGTON—American students demanding gun control walked out of school Wednesday not only in Florida but in Iowa and Texas, Georgia and Maryland. Their uncompromising chants, on the streets and at state capitols and outside the White House, sounded a bit like momentum.

Until the president started talking again.

An unusual wave of teenager activism, led by eloquent survivors of the massacre last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has reignited the U.S. gun debate that had been moribund for most of the Donald Trump era.

A Republican senator has revived his push to expand the use of background checks on gun purchases. A Democratic senator has proposed to raise the minimum age at which people can buy assault rifles. Trump himself has taken a first step toward a regulation banning the bump stock devices used in the Las Vegas massacre in October.

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But Trump’s remarks Wednesday afternoon underscored the reality of the situation: any big change is unlikely, no matter how hot the national outrage, while Republicans control the presidency, Congress and most state governments.

At a “listening session” with a group of students from Douglas and other survivors of gun violence, Trump made vague nods toward gun control measures, saying he would be “strong” on background checks and on “age of purchase.”

But his most enthusiastic suggestion was to put more guns in schools.

Repeating a refrain familiar from gun rights groups and from his own campaign, Trump argued that the answer to criminals with guns is good people with guns. Specifically, he proposed to arm teachers — and to scatter armed military veterans around school campuses for reinforcement.

“You’d have a lot of people that’d be armed, that’d be ready, they are professionals, they may be Marines that left the Marines, left the Army, left the Air Force, and they are very adept at doing that. You’d have a lot of them and they would be spread evenly through the school,” Trump said.

Trump claimed that if Aaron Feis, the football coach slain at Douglas while shielding students, had been carrying a gun, the rest of the massacre there would have been averted.

“If he had a firearm, he wouldn’t have had to run, he would have shot him, and that would have been the end of it,” Trump said.

Gun control advocates, who described Trump’s meeting as a mere photo op, strongly rejected his proposal.

“Police don’t want guns in schools. Educators don’t want guns in schools. Parents don’t want guns in schools. Students don’t want guns in schools. So who does? The NRA and lawmakers beholden to them,” Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said on Twitter.

Trump has previously argued that terror attacks in Paris and elsewhere could have been thwarted with looser gun laws. While his veterans-in-schools idea is highly unlikely to become law, his words were a reminder of the uphill climb any gun control proposal will face at present.

“It’ll take changing Congress,” said Gerry Hills, founder and president of Arizonans for Gun Safety.

“Gun rights is the Republicans’ solidifying issue. They can’t move off of it,” she said. “They have painted themselves into a corner, and they’re going to live and die on this issue.”

Robert Spitzer, a professor of political science at SUNY Cortland who has written five books on gun policy, noted that both measures endorsed by Trump to date — a regulation banning bump stocks and a law tightening the background check process — are supported by the National Rifle Association.

“Congress might move on something like this, but even if there were 100 mass shootings next week, the current Congress will not budge on any major gun policy move,” Spitzer said.

Students who took to the streets said they were realistic about their prospects in the coming months but committed to pushing for long-term change anyway. Inspired by their peers in Florida, hundreds of teenagers from Washington-area Maryland high schools left school at 9:30 a.m. to protest outside the Capitol and White House.

As the students sat outside the White House, they chanted “thoughts and prayers are not enough.” Some held signs denouncing the NRA. One sign said simply, “We Aren’t Safe.”

“This is just the beginning, really. It’s going to be a lot of time before they budge,” said Calista Warren, 17, who wrote “Enough is Enough” on her arm.

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Warren said her parents save voice mails from her in case she is killed at school.

“For a while now, students have been very afraid to go to school. We should not be afraid to get an education. We should not be afraid of guns in a learning environment, and that’s why we’re here,” she said.

Douglas students have become sensations on social media and in traditional media. Tapping into a gun-control movement that has become better organized and funded since the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012, they have served as walking rejoinders to the frequent conservative refrain that gun control should not be discussed in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.

They have also attracted detractors, some unhinged. In conspiracy theories shared thousands of times on Facebook and YouTube, far-right figures have falsely accused them of being puppets of liberal billionaire George Soros or paid actors who are not even students.

“They’re perhaps the most bizarre conspiracy theories in recent American history,” said Kathryn Olmsted, a University of California, Davis history professor who has written a book about U.S. conspiracy theories.

Douglas students have shrugged off the lies. They rallied again in Florida on Wednesday, delivering impassioned speeches after riding a bus eight hours to meet state lawmakers in Tallahassee. Others appeared on a special prime-time CNN town hall.

Trump’s most vocal Douglas critics were absent from his White House meeting. (Cameron Kasky said on Twitter that they weren’t invited; the mother of another, David Hogg, said he had declined.) Several of the students and parents present praised Trump, joined him in calling for more armed figures in schools, or suggested school security measures other than gun control.

“It’s not about gun laws right now. Let’s fix the schools,” said an angry Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed.

Douglas student Sam Zeif, however, tearfully called for a renewed ban on assault weapons, like the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used by alleged killer Nikolas Cruz.

“You know, the Second Amendment, I believe, was for defence. And I fully respect that, like I said. But these are not weapons of defence. These are weapons of war. And I just — I still can’t fathom that I, myself, am able to purchase one,” Zeif said, noting that Australia has had no fatal mass shootings since it imposed strict gun laws.

“I don’t understand why I can still go in a store, and buy a weapon of war. An AR . . . . How did we not stop this after Columbine, after Sandy Hook?”

Trump ended the meeting by promising he would find a “solution.”

In a series of tweets on guns on Thursday morning, Trump said he wants to “raise age to 21” — appearing to offer his first endorsement of the proposal to increase, from 18, the minimum age at which someone can buy an assault rifle like the AR-15.

Misleadingly criticizing media outlets CNN and NBC as “Fake News,” he also claimed he had “never said ‘give teachers guns’” — then reiterated his proposal to give teachers guns, falsely saying he had always said only “the best” teachers, such as veterans, would be armed.

“If a potential ‘sicko shooter’ knows that a school has a large number of weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there ... problem solved,” he wrote.

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