In the wake of the two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Donald Trump has been blaming mental illness as the cause of these tragedies, and calling for reforms to mental health laws.
"Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun," Trump said on Monday.
At the beginning of his presidency, however, Trump rolled back an Obama-era regulation that added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses to the national background check database.
At the time, Chris Cox, the executive director for the lobbying arm of the NRA said the roll back “marks a new era for law-abiding gun owners, as we now have a president who respects and supports our arms.”
Andrea Cabral, the former Suffolk County Sheriff, former secretary of public safety, and CEO of Ascend, told Boston Public Radio Thursday that “what this represented was a signal to the NRA who spent $30 million on ads and in campaign support to get him elected.”
“[Trump] was paying them back. He had already signaled very clearly to them that they would get their money’s worth out of him regardless of what he was saying on the campaign trail,” Cabral said.
