Schumer urges Trump to buck the NRA

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is urging President Trump to back changes to gun laws in the wake of the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history.

“President Trump has an opportunity to wrench his party out of the grasp of the NRA and get our country and our Congress to start talking about commonsense gun safety reforms,” Schumer said from the Senate floor early Wednesday.

Trump is traveling to Las Vegas on Wednesday after 59 people were killed and more than 520 injured during a shooting at a country music festival.

Schumer added that before Trump ran for president, “he repeatedly supported several sane, rational gun safety measures.”

Trump previously praised then-President Obama’s response to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In 2013, he said he was a “big Second Amendment believer, but background checks to weed out the sicko’s are fine.”

Democrats are using Sunday’s mass shooting to renew their efforts to expand background checks and toughen gun control laws — including trying to ban a device that can simulate automatic fire from a semi-automatic weapon.

But GOP lawmakers, who are unlikely to support such legislation, argue it is too soon to discuss the issue and that Democrats are trying to politicize a tragedy.

“I’d say to the president, ‘Mr. President, you have opportunity to buck the NRA, buck the gun lobbyists, buck the swamp and lead this country in an adult conversation about gun violence,'” Schumer added.