WASHINGTON—American students demanding gun control walked out of school Wednesday not only in Florida but in Iowa and Texas, Georgia and Maryland. Their uncompromising chants, on the streets and at state capitols and outside the White House, sounded a bit like momentum.Until the president started talking again.An unusual wave of teenager activism, led by eloquent survivors of the massacre last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has reignited the U.S. gun debate that had been moribund for most of the Donald Trump era. A Republican senator has revived his push to expand the use of background checks on gun purchases. A Democratic senator has proposed to raise the minimum age at which people can buy assault rifles. Trump himself has taken a first step toward a regulation banning the bump stock devices used in the Las Vegas massacre in October.But Trump’s remarks Wednesday afternoon underscored the reality of the situation: any big change is unlikely, no matter how hot the national outrage, while Republicans control the presidency, Congress and most state governments.At a “listening session” with a group of students from Douglas and other survivors of gun violence, Trump made vague nods toward gun control measures, saying he would be “strong” on background checks and on “age of purchase.”But his most enthusiastic suggestion was to put more guns in schools.Repeating a refrain familiar from gun rights groups and from his own campaign, Trump argued that the answer to criminals with guns is good people with guns. Specifically, he proposed to arm teachers — and to scatter armed military veterans around school campuses for reinforcement.“You’d have a lot of people that’d be armed, that’d be ready, they are professionals, they may be Marines that left the Marines, left the Army, left the Air Force, and they are very adept at doing that. You’d have a lot of them and they would be s ...
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