Even as President, Donald Trump Panders to the N.R.A. - The NYT Editorial Board

President Trump eagerly repaid his campaign debt to the National Rifle Association on Friday by appearing at its annual convention in Atlanta. Last year, candidate Trump benefited greatly from the N.R.A.’s endorsement and $30 million worth of campaign support; the N.R.A., in turn, relished Mr. Trump’s fear-inducing agenda, which led to greater arms sales among more and more ordinary Americans.

Interestingly, however, now that Mr. Trump’s in the White House, gun sales have been leveling off, gun company stocks are dropping and industry workers are being laid off. One reason is that President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have departed the political scene, thereby depriving gun marketeers and the N.R.A. of the selling point that caused an eight-year binge of gun sales to buyers who feared tight new regulations.

And binge it was, with the industry growing from 166,000 employees to 301,000 in the Obama years, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. But since the election, “there is no political incentive to buy guns,” Robert Spitzer, a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland, told CNN Money, leaving gun makers and retailers “a victim of their own success.”

Americans concerned for public safety can only hope that the decline will continue as the nation’s gun carnage seems likely to produce another year of 30,000-plus deaths. Mr. Trump himself has displayed no sense of responsibility to offer prescriptions for how that toll might be reduced through gun safety. Rather, in his appearance Friday, he stuck to the red-meat stuff expected at a convention where hundreds of companies displayed an astonishing 15 acres of guns and firearms paraphernalia for thousands of conventioneers.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/even-as-president-donald-trump-panders-to-the-nra.html?emc=edit_th_20170430&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284