In the wake of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 students and faculty were killed, the Trump administration commissioned a report on how to stop such massacres. The White House warned the report authors, however, not to use the word “firearm” at all in an attempt to appease the powerful NRA lobby.
“Think about that for just a moment,” wrote ex-Trump official Miles Taylor, who revealed this incident in an article published in Defiance News on Tuesday. “This was a document commissioned because a gunman had slaughtered children in a school, and the White House wanted the guns edited out of it altogether.” He says that at the time, he and the Homeland Security colleague tasked with composing the report noted that it was “like writing a report on flood safety that never mentioned the rain.”
Then when the report offered the “seemingly modest suggestion” that the government “study — just study — whether the minimum age to buy a firearm should be raised to twenty-one, the same as the drinking age,” writes Taylor, “Trump was terrified of losing the support of the NRA, an organization that would bristle at the mere mention of the subject. So White House staff demanded the gun lobby be allowed to review the report before it went public.” The report’s author ultimately resigned in disgust before it was released, and when it did come out, rewrites ensured that “the final report reached the conclusion the gun lobbyists had wanted,” which happened to be “the opposite of what the government’s own experts had advised.”
Taylor — a security expert who served in the administrations of President George W. Bush then President Donald Trump, spending two years in the Department of Homeland Security under the latter — related this amidst a wider warning about the influence the NRA has on Trump, whose “changes to federal gun policy, it seems to me, are much more about getting rich than gun rights. And the moves represent the culmination of a tidal shift that began in the first administration.”
Now, according to Taylor, “Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) proposed a rule that would let gun dealers mail guns directly to people’s homes for the first time. This would replace the current system, where online-bought weapons must be routed through a licensed store for an in-person background check. It would be one of the most consequential changes to American gun policy in decades,” resulting in a projected 3.3 million firearms being purchased by mail per year.
And who, writes Taylor, stands to cash in? “Among others, the president’s eldest son. Donald Trump Jr. sits on the board of GrabAGun, an online retailer that bills itself as the ‘Amazon of guns,’ and he holds a stake in the company” — yet another instance of Trump’s sons profiting off his position.
Miles notes that this regulatory change is one of some three dozen such rollbacks the administration is pushing, “from narrowing background checks on some gun sales to loosening restrictions tied to mental illness. Even the ATF itself was worried about the latter proposal. The agency flagged that the mental illness rollback could contribute to mass casualty events, a warning that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche reportedly dismissed.”
“You don’t have to be a Second Amendment critic to find this alarming,” asserts Taylor. “I’m not. Personally, I think responsible gun ownership and sensible public safety were never enemies. Most gun owners I know support background checks and think keeping firearms out of the hands of people in acute crisis is just plain common sense, not some kind of evil ‘confiscation’ of personal rights. In fact, most Americans writ large agree with those perspectives when asked in surveys.”
He asserts that, “Gun owners should be the first to express concern. Public policy made behind closed doors like this — with lobbyists hand-editing government reports and cheering on changes that will enrich the president’s family — can be corrupted in both directions.” Taylor emphasizes that he himself owns and carries firearms, so “it should tell you something that I’m spooked by what the Trump administration is planning to do.”
“You’ll see the results soon,” he warns. “Trump’s gun-selling bonanza isn’t about upholding the Constitution. To any sensible observer, you can see it’s about cashing in. After future mass shootings, we’ll be able to ask ourselves more honestly: at what cost?”