Donald Trump received a concealed-carry permit from New York City and owns handguns, but he hasn’t emphasized it since taking office. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo Missing from the gun debate: Trump’s own experience with concealed carry

Over the past two weeks, President Donald Trump has convened a national debate on gun control, holding publicly broadcast meetings with lawmakers and students who survived the Parkland shooting—without mentioning that he’s held a concealed-carry permit.

Trump received a concealed-carry permit from New York City and owns handguns, according to a 2012 interview with the Washington Times, but he hasn’t emphasized it since taking office.


Since the Florida shooting, in which 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a 19-year-old with an assault rifle, Trump has pushed repeatedly to allow teachers and school staff to carry weapons into classrooms, even asserting on Monday that he would have “run in” to stop the shooter, without talking about his own experience with guns.

“If you carry concealed, you are the first responder. You’re the grownup in the room if there’s a crisis,” said Grover Norquist, a Trump ally who is on the board of the National Rifle Association but was not speaking on the group’s behalf. “It changes the nature of who you are.”

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Trump told reporter Emily Miller in the 2012 interview that he owned a .45 caliber Heckler & Koch sidearm and a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. “The way I view it, if nobody has guns, then only the bad guys have them. And they aren’t giving up their guns,” he said at the time.

Trump told a French magazine in 2016 that he “always” carries a gun, adding that he would have tried to stop the shooters who attacked the Bataclan nightclub in Paris in 2015.

Norquist, who was at the White House for a meeting on criminal justice reform earlier this month, said the president remains comfortable with weapons. “He’s compared hardware with the Secret Service guys,” Norquist said. “The president has a deep understanding of what the Second Amendment is. It’s a tangible thing.”

A White House spokesman didn’t immediately respond to questions about the president’s current gun ownership or permit status.

In a White House meeting with Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday, Trump repeated his call to arm teachers.

“Ninety-eight percent of all mass shootings in the U.S. have taken place in gun-free zones,” Trump said in a meeting Wednesday with Republican and Democratic lawmakers. “If you have one person in that room who could carry a gun and know how to use it, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“You’ve got to have defense, too,” Trump said. “You can’t just be sitting ducks. And that’s exactly what we’ve allowed these people to be.”

Trump has called himself a fan of the Second Amendment and has surrounded himself with supporters of gun ownership. Mercedes Schlapp, his director of strategic communications, was a board member of the NRA before joining the White House. His Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, overturned a ban on using lead ammunition on wildlife refuges.

In Feb. 2017, Trump signed a bill to block the Social Security Administration from reporting mentally impaired recipients to a national background-check database.

In addition to allowing guns in schools, the president wants to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill and has suggested establishing more institutions to house people with mental health problems. He has promised to use his executive power to outlaw bump stocks, accessories that allow guns to fire faster, and called for "very strong" background checks, which gun advocates interpret to mean improvements to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The NRA has no objections to those ideas.

The one apparent division between the Trump and the influential gun-rights group is the minimum age for certain gun purchases, which Trump wants to raise to 21 from 18. The suspect in the Parkland school shooting, Nikolas Cruz, 19, legally bought an AR-15 about a year ago.

“The president still supports raising the age limit to 21 for the purchase of certain firearms,” Sanders said Tuesday. “We're not going to get into the details on the specifics of what we will propose, but we expect that to be part of the conversation."

In addition to sitting down with lawmakers, Trump has met with shooting victims, state governors, and NRA leaders. The White House is expected to make an announcement on gun policy later this week.

