Trump's latest claim about the Texas shooting is disingenuous nonsense - By Greg Sargent
It has become an Internet meme that Donald Trump favors extreme vetting for arriving immigrants, but not for would-be gun buyers, and today in South Korea, Trump was confronted by a question about this contrast. It produced a useful answer — one that once again illustrated the deep rot of bad faith at the core of his approach to difficult policy questions.
It’s being widely reported that the Air Force failed to follow the proper policies that would have barred Devin Patrick Kelley, who killed 26 people in a Texas church, from buying firearms. Kelley was discharged from the Air Force after a conviction for domestic violence — including cracking his toddler stepson’s skull — but this information, which could have stopped him from buying the guns he obtained, was not properly transmitted to the FBI or entered into the federal background check database. The Air Force has launched an internal investigation.
Today, in South Korea, Trump was asked by a reporter: “You’ve talked about wanting to put extreme vetting on people trying to come into the United States. I wonder if you would consider extreme vetting for people trying to buy a gun?” Trump replied:
“If you did what you’re suggesting, there would have been no difference three days ago. And you might not have had that very brave person who happened to have a gun or a rifle in his truck go out and shoot him and hit him and neutralize him. If he didn’t have a gun, instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.”
The claim that there would have been “no difference” if Kelley had undergone “extreme vetting” is another way of saying that an improved gun background check system would not have stopped this shooting. But Trump has no earthly way of knowing this one way or the other. We now know that he very well might not have gotten a gun if not for the Air Force’s catastrophic error. Kelley might have procured one illegally, anyway, or he might not have. Yes, Kelley was confronted by an armed neighbor, but we don’t know how many lives that saved or what that says about the broader background check debate.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/11/07/trumps-latest-claim-about-the-texas-shooting-is-disingenuous-nonsense/?utm_term=.bbfd482ff5d6&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1