So despite all the photo ops of The Donald signing one proclamation after another, this one he saw to it was signed in silence and buried in other news.
From the Washington Post (bold emphasis in the original):
While the press corps was distracted and the cable channels aired footage of Trump surrounded by a bipartisan group of smiling women, behind closed doors and with no fanfare the president quietly signed a measure that killed a regulation enacted by the Obama administration to tighten gun background checks.
The rule required the Social Security Administration to send over the names of people who receive government checks for being mentally disabled and others who have been deemed unable to handle their own financial affairs to the FBI office that runs the national background check database. This is a universe of about 75,000 people.
The National Rifle Association says that curtails the Second Amendment rights of these people and convinced GOP leadership to use the Congressional Review Act to undo it. Under the Constitution, Trump had 10 days to sign off. By waiting until the day before the deadline to do so, when there were so many big stories in the mix, he ensured it got minimal coverage.
In a normal time, with a conventional president, undoing this regulation would have been front-page news. Trump’s move would have sparked a national conversation about the country’s continuing failure to seriously address both gun violence and mental illness. Major publications would have run deeper stories about how flawed the national background check system is five years after the massacre at Sandy Hook, with an emphasis on the gun lobby’s role in keeping it that way.
Oh, Trump will get publicity for this, all right, in some parts of the voter world. But when he doesn’t want widespread national attention, he sure knows how not to attract it.
Score another for the NRA, who seems not at all willing “to enforce the laws we have.”