WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is open to considering legislation that would ban “bump stocks” — a firearm accessory used to more rapidly fire rounds — but wants to hear more information on the matter before making a final determination.
“Right now, our focus, as we’ve said over the last couple of days, is on healing and uniting the country,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Thursday.
Sanders was speaking a day after Trump visited victims of a mass shooting in Las Vegas killed 58 and injured more than 500. The perpetrator of the massacre used bump stocks to more rapidly fire rounds into a crowd of concert-goers.
Trump has been a staunch advocate for gun rights, and spoke earlier this year at the National Rifle Association’s annual conference in Atlanta. The gun rights group said just before Sanders spoke that it supported a review of bump stocks, and suggested they should be subject to additional regulation.
Top Republicans and Democrats in Congress have identified new curbs on the use of such accessories as the gun control measure most ripe for success in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting. Sanders on Thursday called the bipartisan support for such a measure a welcome development.
The White House, Sanders said, wants to be “part of that discussion and certainly open to that moving forward.”
But she cautioned against moving toward any single gun control measure before the investigation into the Nevada incident is complete.
“I think we all need to take a step back,” she said during the daily White House press briefing. “Before we can run out and talk about the preventions … we have to determine what caused it.”
“We haven’t gotten that far down the road,” she said.
Earlier this week, Trump appeared open to discussion on new gun control measures, but said enough time had not passed since the rampage to open up the conversation.
“We’re not going to talk about that today. We won’t talk about that,” Trump said inside a Las Vegas trauma center, where he’d met with doctors and nurses who tended to victims.
