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For those involved in the debate over gun policy in the United States, the past few days have been surprisingly eventful. On Friday afternoon, for example, Wayne LaPierre announced that he’s stepping down as CEO of the National Rifle Association, following a highly controversial tenure spanning more than three decades.
As my colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted, LaPierre’s resignation came just days before the start of a potentially damaging corruption trial, which will proceed despite Friday’s announcement. NBC News reported that the organization, in addition to current and former NRA leaders, “are fending off a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2020 that alleges they violated nonprofit laws and misused millions of dollars of NRA funds to finance lavish lifestyles for themselves.”
A few hours after LaPierre’s announcement, Donald Trump campaigned in Iowa, a state where many are still dealing with a school shooting that left a sixth grader dead and seven others injured. The former president acknowledged the tragedy and offered some Trump-like words of advice.
“We’re really with you as much as anybody can be. It’s a very terrible thing that happened,” the Republican told supporters in Sioux City. “And it’s just horrible to see that happening, it’s just horrible. So surprising to see it here. But, uh, have to get over it. We have to move forward, we have to move forward.”
It’s not exactly a secret that Trump has struggled for years with the very idea of empathy. I remember shortly after a deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas, the Associated Press reported that White House aides felt anxiety over what the then-president might say (or tweet) about the mass murders. They were nervous, of course, because of his “troubled track record in such delicate moments.”
The report added at the time, “Trump often has had difficulty embracing a central role of the American presidency: consoling people dealing with intense grief.”
Telling Iowans to “get over” a deadly school shooting was a timely reminder that he has not improved in this area.
But there was another development on Friday that also stood out as notable. The Associated Press reported:
More than 500 gun purchases have been blocked since a new gun law requiring stricter background checks for young people went into effect in 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday. ... The bipartisan law passed in June 2022 was the most sweeping gun legislation in decades and requires extra checks for any gun purchases by people under age 21."
The AP report added that, according to the Justice Department, those who'd been denied a gun purchase included "a person convicted of rape, a suspect in an attempted murder case and someone who had been involuntarily committed for mental-health treatment."
President Joe Biden, who signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, issued a statement that said, “Simply put: this legislation is saving lives.”
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who helped negotiate the provisions of the law, added, “It can be difficult to measure success in terms of tragedies prevented, but there is no doubt that stopping these 500 guns from landing in the hands of someone who poses a danger to themselves or others has saved lives.”
I’m not unsympathetic to arguments that the bulk of the efforts to combat crime is done at the local level. But the more laws like these work, the more we’re reminded that federal policymakers can — and should — make a difference.