Addressing a group of survivors and victims’ family members from last week’s high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, President Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested that teachers undergo firearm training and be allowed to carry concealed weapons inside schools. | Michael Probst/AP Photo Trump offers plenty of ideas but no concrete plan on guns The White House said the president, who echoed NRA talking points in a West Wing gathering with law enforcement, is ‘going to take input from a lot of folks.’

Arming teachers. “Hardening” schools. Strengthening background checks. Raising the age for gun purchases. Banning bump stocks. Reopening mental institutions. Even revisiting the rating system for video games and movies.

That was the dizzying array of suggestions President Donald Trump threw out in just one meeting Thursday for how to deal with gun violence in the wake of the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.


But it wasn’t clear how he planned to transform any of his ideas into reality. Trump told the gathering of law enforcement officials in the White House’s Roosevelt Room that he’d reached out to lawmakers in recent days who signaled a willingness to consider background checks – it wasn’t immediately clear who – and asserted that the minimum age for long gun purchases should be raised to 21, a move long opposed by the National Rifle Association. “And the NRA will back it,” the president said – even though the organization said the opposite just this week.

The comments came a day after Trump surprised aides during a listening session with school shooting survivors by advancing the idea of rolling back gun-free zone restrictions at schools to allow teachers and staff to carry concealed weapons as a deterrent, a proposal long promoted by the NRA.

Yet as with health care and immigration, Trump has appeared to search for a clear agenda, offering sometimes contradictory prescriptions.

Trump heartily backed gun rights on the presidential campaign and boasted as recently as his State of the Union address about his efforts to protect the Second Amendment—but since the shooting, he has shown an inclination to take steps in response as student survivors and bereaved parents have become omnipresent on cable news demanding change.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

At the White House event, Trump called the suspected Florida gunman “a sicko” and said there is a “tremendous feeling” toward making changes in the wake of the Parkland attack, “including at the NRA.”

Deputy White House press secretary Raj Shah said at a briefing Thursday that Trump spoke last weekend with Chris Cox, the head of the NRA’s legislative arm.

“In dealing with school safety issues, we don’t expect to agree with the NRA on every single issue,” Shah said. “It’s going to be part of an ongoing conversation [with] their stakeholders along with family members, students, parents, teachers who the president heard from yesterday, local officials who he talk to today. So he’s going to get opinions from a lot of folks and he's going to come to the right steps that are necessary.”

Shah added: “He’s going to take input from a lot of folks and come forward with proposals that we think can improve school safety.”

Trump has already called on the Justice Department to act on bump stocks, gun accessories that allow semiautomatic rifles to fire faster, though a government review of the accessories was already underway. Legislation similar to Trump’s background-checks idea has stalled in Congress because Republicans want to pair it with language expanding rights to carry concealed weapons.

Yet even as Trump flirted with some ideas that the gun lobby is wary of — particularly raising the legal age for buying guns like the assault rifle used in the Parkland shooting, something Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said this week he’d support — the president also went out of his way to flag his support for the NRA, which has been staunchly supportive since the 2016 campaign.

“Chris and the folks who work so hard at the @NRA are Great People and Great American Patriots,” Trump tweeted early Thursday. “They love our Country and will do the right thing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

At both Thursday’s event and the one with families on Wednesday, Trump adopted many of the gun lobby’s arguments. “I want my schools protected just like I want my banks protected,” Trump said, borrowing a line that was used by NRA head Wayne LaPierre in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday morning.

“What President Trump thinks are the solutions to gun violence are straight out of the NRA playbook,” said Avery Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “He is an anti-gun reform, anti-gun safety president.”

The Brady Campaign and other organizations calling for gun control have laid out priorities including universal background checks, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and enacting a national “extreme risk law,” a restraining order-type law that would allow a judge to temporarily revoke someone’s firearms and ability to purchase weapons under certain criteria.

Trump has not endorsed any of those ideas.

At Thursday’s meeting, he brushed off comments by Florida Department of Education Commissioner Pam Stewart about active-shooter drills, calling the exercises — which are practiced in many schools — “a very negative thing” and “very hard on children.”

He said his preference would be for a “hardened school” where children could be kept safe.

Trump also continued to push the idea of allowing teachers to carry guns in schools.

“I never said ‘give teachers guns’ like was stated on Fake News @CNN & @nbc," Trump tweeted. "What I said was to look at the possibility of giving concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience - only the best. 20% of teachers, a lot, would now be able to immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions.”

“Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A ‘gun free’ school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!” he tweeted.

It’s a position he has tried to defend before. In May 2016, as a candidate, Trump said, “I don’t want to have guns in classrooms, although in some cases teachers should have guns in classrooms, frankly.” He later told CNN that “school resource officers” or trained teachers should have weapons.

He accused his opponent at the time, Hillary Clinton, of misinterpreting his position, remarking that “the way she said it meant like every student should be sitting there carrying guns.”

The idea of arming teachers has prompted opposition from education groups, who say it would not prevent violence. The high school in Parkland, Florida had an armed security official who did not encounter the shooter. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said at a town hall event hosted Wednesday night by CNN that he does not support arming teachers.

In states that have let school districts decide about allowing firearms on campus, few school boards have been interested.

The NRA backs the idea. LaPierre expressed support for the push to arm school officials during his CPAC speech, calling on educators to scrap “gun-free zones,” which he said created “wide-open targets” for shooters.

“To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said.

Rubio knocked down the idea of bringing guns on school campuses during a CNN town hall Wednesday with students and parents from Stoneman Douglas. “I would admit to you right now, I answer that as much as a father as I do as a senator, the notion that my kids are going to school with teachers that are armed with a weapon is not something that, quite frankly, I'm comfortable with,” Rubio said.

Trump’s legislative push appears to be in its early stages. Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who has been a leading voice calling for gun control since the Sandy Hook shootings, had not yet heard from the president, though his office said White House staff reached out on Thursday.

He has said he opposes Trump’s idea for putting guns on campuses.

“That’s an insane idea that will make our schools less safe, not more safe,” he told CNN. “It’s a creation of the gun lobby. The gun industry, for years, has called on societies to arm themselves in order to protect themselves, which belies all the evidence that tells us that communities and homes that have more guns are more likely to be subject to gun crimes. But it has the benefit of allowing the gun industry to sell more guns.”



CORRECTION: Due to incorrect information from a White House pool report, a previous version of this article erroneously said the president's comments on active shooter drills came in response to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.