Or Trump. He's stupid enough to actually say that stuff.
Donald Trump said at a meeting with congressional leaders yesterday that he'd be open to a whole bunch of gun-grabbing ideas. It's almost 24 hours later and we're way behind the news cycle on this -- it lasted 22 minutes -- but he did at least briefly worry a few second amendment absolutists before they all went back to calling the kids from Parkland, Florida, a bunch of crisis actors.
In what would be truly worrisome talk for a normal president, Trump said some very stupid stuff when Mike Pence said "violence protection orders" might be a good idea, since they could allow authorities to seek a court order to disarm someone who's made threats of violence. Such a policy could "give families and local law enforcement ... the ability to go to court, obtain an order and then collect not only the firearms but any weapon" from a potentially dangerous person. Pence started to say it would of course be vital to ensure that due process was respected, but Trump wasn't having any of that liberal wussiness with "court orders" and "due process":
"Take the guns first. Go through due process second," President Trump says at a meeting with bipartisan lawmakers. "I like taking the guns early." https://t.co/lQkq3krCWs pic.twitter.com/0iPywBQ66b
— CNN (@CNN) February 28, 2018
Or, Mike, take the firearms first, and then go to court. Because that’s another system. Because a lot of times, by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court, to get the due process procedures.I like taking the guns early. Like, in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida, he had a lot of firearms -- they saw everything. To go to court would have taken a long time. So, you could do exactly what you’re saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.
Jesus, Donald, we hate guns and even we think tossing due process in the toilet as a dumb inconvenience is a terrible idea. If we actually thought Donald Trump had any idea what he's talking about, we'd be alarmed, but then we recall that this is the guy who wants to have a nuclear fistfight with North Korea, distrusts the courts all the time, and will say whatever he thinks will make his base love him, and we remind ourselves that this was just a minor misfire in Trump's talking-point spew processor. In all the cop movies he's seen, waiting for a warrant lets the bad guy get away, so fuck the courts -- you have to go in and go hard, like Dirty Harry. It apparently didn't occur to him how that might play with the folks who suspected that Barack Obama was coming for their guns if he so much as suggested that people being shot to death was somehow regrettable (as long as it wasn't cops doing the shooting -- then he wanted to take cops' guns). Just look at the panic in the Breitbart comments on that one:
We do sort of love that last one, with its plaintive lament that Trump is trying too hard to ingratiate himself with people who would destroy him, and aren't even really Americans. Please, Mr. President, remember us and come back, come back my love!
While it's been relegated to the very bottom of the page to make room for a huge spread marking the sixth anniversary of Andrew Breitbart dropping dead, Breitbart did at least devote a big chunk of its front page to Trump's perfidy, even if you do have to scroll way down to see it:
Those staunch TrumPatriots at the Gateway Pundit didn't even mention Trump's plan to take the guns away before the due process, because was Donald Trump a community organizer from Kenya? He was not. Here's what the Stupidest Site on the Internet was upset about Wednesday afternoon:
By the morning, Trump was already walking back any "not so good" ideas that may have been mentioned in the meeting the day before -- like anything the NRA wouldn't approve of:
Just don't mention that some of the "not so good" ideas came out of Trump's mouth, OK? Clearly, the next step will be for some very minor gun measure to get a bit of traction in the Senate, so that when its sponsors drop by to meet with Trump, Stephen Miller can remind Trump they killed his father, threw up in the lobby of Trump Tower, and called him dumb. Then he'll call the survivors of the Parkland massacre shitheads and we'll move on to the next bucket of chaos.
