During his campaign, Donald Trump often bragged about his skill as a negotiator.
In conversations, he ventured that, as president, he might be able to resolve two of the most thorny and tragic dilemmas: finding peace in the Mideast and reaching a sensible compromise on guns.
He said he would hop in his limo and go to N.R.A. headquarters in suburban Virginia and stay as long as it took to make a deal, noting that there were points where both sides in the debate could agree.
.. Trump wrote in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” that he was in favor of a ban on assault weapons and “a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.” But then the N.R.A. spent more than $30 million to get him elected.
.. “You came through big for me and I am going to come through for you,” he told the N.R.A. after his election, out-Hestoning Charlton Heston.
.. After 49 people were killed in a shooting at an Orlando nightclub in June 2016, he suggested that it would have been “a beautiful, beautiful sight” if more people in the club had been armed and went “boom” at the “maniac” shooting at them.
It was too hard-line even for the N.R.A.
“I don’t think you should have firearms where people are drinking,” N.R.A. chief Wayne LaPierre demurred.
.. Last year, weeks after taking office, Trump signed a bill rolling back a regulation that made it harder for mentally ill people to buy guns.
.. I wrote in disgust about President Barack Obama failing to marshal the L.B.J. mojo to push through a gun control bill after Sandy Hook even though he had 90 percent of Americans on his side and a Democratic Senate.
.. America would accept periodic human sacrifices to the trigger gods in the interest of upholding this bizarre notion that the Second Amendment is inviolate or even really threatened.
.. Since Newtown, there have been more than 1,600 mass shootings.